


Into the Darkness

by missmarianne



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Bigotry & Prejudice, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Death Eaters, F/M, Femme Fatale, First War with Voldemort, Gen, Magic, Multi, Privilege, Pureblood Politics (Harry Potter), Wealth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-09-30 23:13:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 55,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17232968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmarianne/pseuds/missmarianne
Summary: The year is 1970, and the Wizarding World teeters on the brink of violence. Muggle-borns protest discrimination, pure-bloods respond with fear and resentment, and rumors of an underground network and its shadowy leader, advocating either resistance or genocide, further polarize society. Amid the societal unrest, seventh-year Bellatrix Black struggles to uphold her family legacy while carving her own destiny. But as war looms ever closer and her family threatens to be fractured apart, Bellatrix must decide where her allegiance lies, and if there is anything she would not sacrifice to achieve greatness.





	1. Proem

**Author's Note:**

> This work was started SO, SO MANY YEARS ago, but I finally decided I would give a shot at editing and posting it! At least it was writing practice and helped me explore my longtime fascination with female villains (and Bellatrix specifically.) Hope you enjoy, despite the editing-in-progress!

_Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned_

_With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned._

_-_ Dirge Without Music _, Edna St. Vincent Milay_

 

* * *

 

_Grimmauld Place. August 30 th, 1957_

 “Give her back. She is mine.”

Bellatrix extended her hand, demanding her stolen property from her sister. Andromeda clutched the doll tighter in her pudgy fists.

“Give her back!” Bellatrix made a grab for it and missed. “You’re going to ruin Morgana!”

Andromeda giggled. She shook the doll, christened Morgana, by her china arm, practically wrenching it from its socket.

In fury, Bellatrix squealed. She looked for her father or perhaps her mother or aunt, but none seemed to be nearby. Adults only appeared, it seemed to her, when it was most inconvenient. Half an hour earlier, her uncle had emerged to scold her for trying to climb the drawers in the chifforobe. He was the one who had ordered her to play quietly with her sister and doll. Though it might have been boring, Bellatrix had playacted Morgana to prepare a Dark potion (made of flowers crumpled from a nearby vase) which Andromeda would then have to drink—but then her sister had snatched the doll and ruined the entire game.

In the face of Andromeda’s unruliness, the room was empty save the two girls, the rigid furniture, and the dark hangings. Bellatrix would have to deal with her sister alone.

The doll rattled from a particularly violent shake.

“You’re breaking her!” Bellatrix again attempted to wrench Morgana out of her sister’s hands; Andromeda danced away, swinging the precious doll above her head as she did.

Bellatrix balled her fists. Her gaze narrowed on her doll, held in her sister’s greedy hands.

A noise like a thunderclap burst through the stifled room, and a blur of motion rent the still air. As if propelled by an invisible force, the doll hurtled into Bellatrix’s arms. Simultaneous, Andromeda shot backwards with the force of a bullet. Her head collided against a wooden cabinet with a sharp _crack_ , her legs buckled, and she began to wail.

For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of the crying as Bellatrix looked from her rescued doll to her bawling sister, but before she could devise any sort of excuse, she heard footsteps clamoring down the hall, and she saw her father standing in the doorway.

“By Salazar,” he murmured, surveying the scene.

 “What is going on here?” Her mother appeared beside him, bouncing a baby with a shock of blonde hair in her arms. “Walburga told me we must make them stop screaming, and I need to put Narcissa down for a nap.”

“Druella, I saw her, as I walked by,” said her father. “It was Bella.”

Bellatrix glanced between her parents, trying to read their faces. “Andromeda stole Morgana and wouldn’t give her back,” she said defiantly. “I only did it because there was no other way to stop her.”

Her father stooped to Bellatrix’s height. “You meant to do this?”

Meeting her father’s eyes, Bellatrix nodded.

“She is only five, Cygnus,” her mother said. “I know her abilities set in before three, but _intentional_ …and only five...”

“Bellatrix,” said her father, straightening to his full and impressive height, “Come with me.”

Sensing no other option, Bellatrix trailed out of the room on her father’s heels. She heard the faint gurgles of her sister’s continued cries and her mother’s tight voice: “Stop fussing, Andromeda. You are not so badly hurt. I will heal it if you stand still…”

The noises drifted with them down the dim hallway, lit by fluttering candles in brackets along the walls.

Still clutching Morgana, Bellatrix followed her father. She suspected where he led her. They passed a window. The twilight was gathering in a blue hush, the first stars just beginning to peer into the oncoming night.

As she had anticipated, her father turned towards the drawing room. Bellatrix wondered if her aunt and uncle would be sitting inside to discipline her. It was a common occurrence when she and her family went to visit her aunt and uncle’s home, on days like today. Bellatrix was in awe of them and afraid of them by turns; she hoped they would not scold her. She hated people telling her they were _disappointed in her._

But, when Bellatrix padded into the still, immaculate drawing room, neither her aunt nor uncle was inside. It was just the grand chandelier and the olive paneled walls and the wide windows and the beautiful tapestry, occupying a wall to itself. Even before she had learned how to read, Bellatrix could remember looking at the names, spider-webbing, spindly, interconnected, and tracing the scintillant golden threads and burns woven into the fabric.

“Do you know what you just did?” her father asked her.

Now that she was being asked, she had suspected it the entire time. She had hoped it. She had willed it.

“Magic,” Bellatrix whispered, excitement flushing her voice.

“Yes,” said Cygnus. His expression softened. “You did, my beautiful little girl. Intentional magic at that—and only five.”

“Almost six,” Bellatrix corrected airily, examining the nearest names.

“Yes,” modified her father. “Almost six, but it is something special. Bellatrix.” She focused on her father once more. “It is something very special when a young wizard—”

“Witch.”

Her father ground his teeth. “Do not interrupt so much. It is something special, when a young _wizard_ performs intentional magic for the first time. You have done well by the Black family, child.”

Forgetting about the wizard remark, Bellatrix felt a smile spread across her face. This was the highest praise she could get. And she rather liked being praised.

“When I grow, I want to do magic like Morgana,” she told her father confidently, setting the doll down for examination on a nearby divan.

He humored her with a chuckle. “You may yet, Bella. Now,” he said, his tone growing more serious, “I have to tell you something. Listen. Someday, everything that the Black family owns—this house at Grimmauld Place, this tapestry, and all of the heirlooms and titles—all of it is given to one person. This person is very important, and they are called the _heir_.”

Bellatrix did not trouble to hide her suspicion. “ _Heir_ ,” she repeated. She could not figure out what her father was trying to say, and he spoke in the intense voice normally reserved for chastising. But he mentioned things she liked: the house at Grimmauld Place, the tapestry, the jewels she liked to look at on the shelves which she knew to be called “heirlooms.”

Her father continued, “The heir is also the person that becomes the leader of the family. Who is the leader of our family now?”

Bellatrix grew impatient; the names on the tapestry were more interesting than this talk of heirs and the family, which she already understood.

“Uncle Orion,” she replied, though her eyes were now trailing the lines slithering from _Phineas Nigellus_ to _Ursula Flint._   Even more than examining the family tree, Bellatrix would prefer more discussion of magic and her talents, but her father persisted.

“Yes, Uncle Orion is the patriarch—or the leader, because he is my elder brother. And someday, according to the rules of our family, his eldest son will become the heir and the next leader.”

Stirred by a spark of indignation, Bellatrix ripped her eyes from the tapestry. “But Orion hasn’t got _any_ sons!” she declared. Didn’t her father know that?

“ _Precisely_ ,” said Cygnus, gazing at her. “And, if there are no direct sons, or a son who cannot fulfill his duty, the heir, and the next leader, becomes the worthiest person.”

With a tingle that started in her fingers and stirred through her entire body, Bellatrix realized what her father implied. “Me?”

“Yes, my daughter.” A fierce glint lit his eye. “Some say that I should have inherited instead of your uncle, even though I was younger. But you are the eldest child. If your magic stays strong and you prove yourself worthy, when you come of age, it could all be yours. You are a good leader, are you not?”

_Leader of the Black family_. The words sounded beautiful. They sounded like a promise. Morgana had been the leader of her family too; she had proved herself over her squib brother to become a queen and a beautiful Dark sorceress.

“Show me where I am again,” Bellatrix instructed her father.

With a tired chuckle, her father squinted at the tapestry and pointed out the name. She recognized a great letter B and the two curving L’s.

“That’s me,” said Bellatrix aloud. “Bellatrix Black.”

“Do you remember what your name means?” her father asked. “Warrior. My little warrior.”

Bellatrix liked it when he called her that.

“Someday, I’ll be heir,” she told him. She glanced around the rich room. It was beginning to come alive with shadows in the growing night, and she could imagine what it would be like when it was her room. She would be leader, and she would have a real wand and could do whatever she liked. She would be a Dark witch, and she would be astonishing to behold.

Her father smiled. “That’s right, my warrior. My Bellatrix.”

 

* * *

 


	2. The Heir to the House of Black

_#12 Grimmauld Place. March 28 th, 1970._

Bellatrix waited.

At her side, Sirius did the same. Sitting immobile before her and her cousin, Uncle Orion surveyed them with a superior eye.

By the end of this ceremony, either Bellatrix or Sirius would be the heir.

Struggling to stand still, Bellatrix questioned if a formal ceremony was necessary. The entire affair seemed contrived. With just the three of them in the familiar drawing room of Grimmauld Place, she felt like a player without an audience. It was common to assemble all the children of the leading family together, but Regulus was absent. At seven, her youngest cousin was too little for consideration. In a further break from tradition, Bellatrix would soon be named despite not being Orion’s son.

At least Orion had finally decided to make his announcement. Perhaps the formality would make her feel more honored when her uncle spoke her name, she thought.

Yet, Bellatrix felt claustrophobic. She itched in the high-necked set of robes she had chosen for the occasion, tight and starched. Standing still had never come easily for Bellatrix.

Her eye roved, not wanting to linger on her uncle. Wintry, lined, and scowling, Orion looked ominous in the drawing room's pale light. Not that he frightened her, of course; she merely did not feel like looking at him.

Behind Orion, Bellatrix could just make out her name on the bottom right of the family tapestry. Unable to stop the paranoid thoughts, she wondered if the tapestry knew something she didn’t.

“Bellatrix Black,” said Orion.

Bellatrix started at the sound of her name. She reminded herself it did not indicate Orion's final decision. Ever adherent to traditions, Orion would question both contenders before pronouncing his heir.

“Come forward.”

Though Orion’s voice rarely exceeded a gruff mumble, Bellatrix conceded its power. It carried the intangible and inextricable quality of the Black patriarch.

 _Or matriarch_ , she thought with a private smile—which she concealed. Outwardly, she inclined her head. Putting on a show of docile submission, she took a measured step towards her uncle.

“Sirius Black,” said Orion. “Come forward.”

Bellatrix's cousin licked his pink lips. Fidgeting in overlong robes, Sirius stepped forward to stand at her right. Sirius's hair had been slicked poorly; a stray piece poked out from behind his ear. Bellatrix fought down a laugh. Almost exactly eight years her junior, his head leveled her shoulder.

“You are assembled so I can name one of you heir to the Black line,” said Orion, casting his son and niece a sharp glance.

Beneath the hem of her robes, Bellatrix felt her toes twitch up and down in her boot. She knew why she was here. She did not need to be told.

Though Orion might have a finally gotten himself a son or two, Sirius was hardly fit to be heir. And amid the current mistrust of pure-bloods, a strong heir was imperative. The heir solidified the future of their line. They assisted the patriarch with family responsibilities. It must be someone sure to carry on the Black legacy.

In light of her own father’s predicament, strong leadership was even more essential.

Bellatrix had wanted to be heir since she was a child. She deserved it. Regardless of his parentage or sex, she deserved it more than a wandless ten-year-old.

“Bellatrix,” said Orion, glancing at her.

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

Bellatrix’s mouth felt dry, her hands rather shaky. Irritated at these occurrences, she strove to ignore them. She did not know why she should feel so queer; there was no contest between her and Sirius. Bellatrix was more qualified. If there had not been a measure of certainty, Orion would not have broken with tradition to consider her. Although, she reminded herself, he would not have troubled with ceremony if he was decided.

Bellatrix refocused her energy on seeming as capable and as ingratiating as possible. The former was truthful; the latter an act.

“You have come of age but have not finished schooling.”

“That’s right, Sir,” said Bellatrix. “I will return to the school in two days, after the Easter holiday.” _As you very well know_ , she thought, sick of the self-indulgence.

“And you are not engaged.”

Bellatrix bit her tongue. “No, Sir.”

Her lack of attachment _should_ be an advantage in this instance, Bellatrix reflected. It insured that a man from some rival family would not be able to claim ownership to their wealth. But in her uncle's grim expression, she saw he disagreed, as did the rest of her family. Even though she was not yet 19, she had disappointed him by failing to secure a pure-blood husband.

The doctrine of domesticity ran deeper. Since Bellatrix could first remember, her mother had preached that a pure-blood witch should also be pure of flesh. Though Druella had been delicate to ambiguity, Bellatrix had understood well enough. Sometime during her fifteenth year, she had understood better. Caius Yaxley, Ambrose Avery, and Rodolphus Lestrange accommodated her rebellion. She was not without suitors, she reflected bitterly.

However, Bellatrix doubted these trysts were what Orion meant by "engagement." She stayed silent.

“And your father is ill,” Orion said. “Dragon-pox.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bellatrix again. Against her will, her memory conjured Cygnus's green-tinged skin and blood-stained handkerchiefs. Her mother’s strained face, hovering over another letter to their healer, twisted in her mind's eye. She banished the vision with a smile at Orion. “And I thank you again for giving me and my sisters a place to stay over the holiday.”

Her uncle looked impassive. “No good for you to all catch the damned illness yourselves.”

“Mother’s last letter did say he was feeling well. We might still spend tomorrow at our own Blackhall Manor, as planned. My father likely fares better every day.”

“We have been hoping for my brother’s full and speedy recovery,” said Orion without inflection.

“And truly,” Bellatrix interjected, “His health should not impact your decision. I can perform any duties required of me, regardless of his health. Sir.”

Orion’s nostrils flared at her reply.

She could have kicked herself. He had interpreted her directness as impudence, she was sure of it. Bellatrix knew how the patriarchs of the old families behaved, especially Orion. She had planned to play along with his sickening game, affecting deference and manners and all the rest.

It was foolishness. Bellatrix _knew_ that outspokenness was a desirable quality in any family leader. Were she only a wizard rather than a witch, the trait would have been considered an advantage. Blinded as he was by the fact she was a woman, Bellatrix hardly expected her frigid uncle to see. Orion insisted that she abide by the strangling laws of decorum expected of pure-blood witches.

If she were Cygnus’s oldest son, Bellatrix suspected Orion would have named her heir already.

The entire affair was an exercise in patience.

Orion turned his glare towards his son. “Sirius,” he said. “You have not yet started school.”

“No,” her cousin answered. And, with a somewhat sulky glance at the ground, added, “Sir.”

Orion cleared his throat.

Was that all Sirius would be asked, Bellatrix wondered? Was it time? Her heart beat against the inside of her ribs like a bird trying to flee its cage.

After a pause, Orion said, “Very well. I have reached my decision. I name my heir as—”

A scream tore through the air.

Orion started. “What in the—by Salazar—”

The scream wailed higher in pitch and volume.

“What’s happening?” asked Sirius. He tried in vain to arrange his face into something apathetic, but his eyes betrayed his fear.

Bellatrix felt as though the blood were draining out of her face as she recognized the sound. “Narcissa,” she breathed.

Before she could think, Bellatrix flung herself forward. The drawing room spun as the Disapparition pressed her into its normal confines. Though the tightness relented when her surroundings resolved into the first-floor entryway, Bellatrix’s lungs still felt as though they were compressed.

The screaming stopped abruptly. Something lurched in Bellatrix’s chest.

“Cissy?” she panted, flinging open the back door of Number 12 Grimmauld Place. She shrieked into the hazy grey afternoon. “Cissy!”

The back garden revealed no trace of Bellatrix’s youngest sister—no trace of her gently waving robes or strikingly blonde hair, no trace of her reassuring, secretive smile. Narcissa had said she was going to rest outside, promising to stay secure within the magically protected plot of land, while Bellatrix awaited their uncle’s decision. Where in the world was Aunt Walburga during this screaming fit? Where was Andromeda?

Where was Narcissa?

Bellatrix scanned the garden. She was vaguely aware that her uncle had followed her. Not daring to set foot outside the house, he hesitated in the entryway.

And then, Bellatrix spotted her, staggering and crumpling before the rosebush.

“Cissy!”

Bellatrix reached her sister in an instant, hands fumbling to support her. Narcissa’s face was wet and her slender shoulders heaved as Bellatrix caught her.

“Are you hurt? What has happened? Narcissa, who hurt you?”

Narcissa shook her head. “I’m not—I—” Her light hair hung in front of face, muffling her sobs. “Get me inside,” she whispered. “Quickly. Let’s get inside.”

Bellatrix loosened her hold. Narcissa pushed herself upright, eyes darting, as she hurried up the walk to the house. Wand drawn in clammy hands, Bellatrix followed.

Orion shut the door behind them with a click, eyes flashing.

“What is the meaning of this?”

Before Bellatrix could even guess at answering, the stairs creaked. Aunt Walburga, Sirius, and Bellatrix’s younger cousin Regulus crammed into the entryway. Behind them, Andromeda emerged from wherever she had been occupied. Her face looked tense and white against her dark hair.

“Cissy?” gasped Bellatrix's middle sister, gripping the banister as she rushed down the stairs. “Are you alright? I was writing a letter—I didn’t hear—”

“Explain this,” Walburga demanded, jowls wobbling beneath paunchy cheeks. Her brow lowered over her eyes as she glanced from Narcissa to Bellatrix.

Narcissa pushed her hair from her wet cheeks, steadying herself.

“A man,” she said. “I was standing in the garden. A man entered through the back gate. Perhaps he came from the alley--I didn’t—” Her breath caught in her throat, and she exhaled before continuing.

“He came through the gate and pointed his wand at me and said, ‘You’re one of them Blacks. Your father’s the one that pushed through that law, taking away rights of Muggle-borns.’

Then, he threatened me. He said something I will not repeat. And then I screamed.”

In horror, Bellatrix gazed at her sister. Her blood pounded, and the fury began to overtake her. “He _threatened_ you?”

Narcissa nodded.

Bellatrix cried out before anyone else could speak. “Cissy, why didn’t you curse him?”

 “I would have if he got any closer, in spite of school rules." Despite her hysteria only moments before, Narcissa met the question coldly. "My scream seemed to scare him, so I did not need to, and he ran back through the gate. And then you were there.”

Bellatrix was about to spit another indignation, but her uncle spoke first.

“He was able to just walk through the gate?”

Of all things, that was what he chose to focus on? Bellatrix was still brandishing her wand in her hand. She had half a mind to run back to the garden and try to track the man down that very second.

Orion’s brow furrowed. “The charms should have prevented any Muggle brats from even seeing the property.”

“Well," Sirius piped up, "he wasn’t a Muggle if he had a wand, was he? He was a wizard.”

Bellatrix scoffed. “But weren’t you listening? What he said about father’s decree? He must have _come_ from Muggles, I’m sure of it.”

“Not necessarily,” implored Andromeda, and Bellatrix ground her teeth together. “The movement’s highly pacifist. That man was likely a renegade, someone who’s not Muggle-born himself. There would be so much more risk for anyone personally facing oppression—”

“I shall see to the concealment spells,” sneered Walburga, ignoring Andromeda’s pleas. “And someone at the Ministry will hear about this…daring to threaten a Black. Undermining your father. Filthy _Mudblood_ ,” she spat.

Andromeda, Regulus, and Sirius flinched at Walburga’s insult. Narcissa and Bellatrix did not. Anyone who threatened her sister deserved any slur they got, Bellatrix found herself thinking.

And further, what was the point in shying away from the reality of the matter? Bellatrix and her family were pure-bloods. As such, they inherited a history of persecution at the hands of violent Muggles and Muggle sympathizers. For centuries, her ancestors had struggled to survive witch burnings, hatred, and beheadings. The Statute of Secrecy had brought some reprieve. But _now_ , the wizarding community vilified families like hers for prizing their purity. Others scorned the Blacks for the simple crime of marrying those they knew to be trustworthy. The wizarding community now sympathized with the Muggle-borns the offspring of the vicious creatures who had terrorized wizard-kind for centuries. This was the way the world worked, as Bellatrix’s family had taught her since she could first remember. It a philosophy that all the people she respected corroborated.

Mulling over these thoughts, Bellatrix’s fingers tightened on her wand. She was not a coward, she thought to herself, she would be a warrior. She was a Black. And she would not sit passively and endure fear tactics from monsters who entered gardens to attack underage girls.

Orion massaged his temple and barked, “All of you—upstairs. Sirius and Regulus, to your rooms. Girls—wait in the upstairs parlor. You will be sent home a day early, as soon as Walburga gathers your things.”

“But what about the man?” Bellatrix abandoned her goal to hold her tongue. Was her Uncle going to ignore what had just happened? “He is still out there! He knew who Narcissa was and was able to break through the enchantments!”

“Which is why I am sending you home a day early,” said Orion, as if closing the discussion.

Bellatrix stared back, unintimidated. “But we must find him! We cannot let him get away with this!”

“We will notify Magical Law Enforcement—”

“And what will they do?” Bellatrix was growing beside herself. The anger that sat dormant in her blood was boiling once more, roused by the possibility of some task, something that could provide some motion, some excitement. “There’s a chance they would actually side _with_ the terrorist. Our only hope is to find him ourselves!”

“Put that thing away, girl!” roared Orion, indicating Bellatrix’s wand. She had not realized—in her insistence she had gestured it towards her uncle.

She lowered her wand with difficulty. “Uncle, I beg you—let’s not sit idle—”

“You will do as I say!” A temple throbbed in his forehead as he spluttered, “I am the head of the family. I say the Blacks are not— not like the rash _vigilantes_ who hide behind masks. Unlike them, we will not sink to tackling scum ourselves. Despite the pitiful Mudblood outcry, the Blacks still have friends at the Ministry. They will see to it that justice is served. Now control yourself and go sit upstairs with your sisters.”

“That’s weak!” It was against Bellatrix’s better judgement, but she did not care. She could not control herself. She was always being told to sit still, to wait, to do nothing, and she was sick of it. “The Blacks are not weak, but you act like a coward! You—”

“YOU ARE A WOMAN AND YOU WILL DO AS YOU ARE TOLD!”

His roar was deafening. A speck of spittle flew from his mouth and hit Bellatrix’s check. She did not flinch.

Andromeda looked from Bellatrix to Orion as if she wanted to intervene but didn’t know how. Narcissa’s lip trembled. Sirius gazed determinedly at the floor. Regulus sniffed, wide-eyed and scared. Walburga regarded Bellatrix with a glare bordering on disgust.

“Go upstairs,” hissed Orion, his voice deathly quiet. “And if you want me to even consider you as a contender to be heir, you will do as I say.”

Bellatrix stood dumb. She was powerless against his authority if she chose to honor it. And choosing not to honor it would mean severing ties from her entire family for eternity.

It was defeat, and she knew it.

Bellatrix spun on her heal. Fighting to look nonplussed, she fled the hallway and took the stairs as quickly as she was able.

She heard her sisters and cousins walking behind her.

Walburga’s muffled voice croaked down the hall: “Mudbloods have been even worse than usual lately, Orion. I am hardly surprised. The filth is out to pollute all of us. It has been a year since the first damn decree, and they are all still reeling—if anything, the measure Cygnus paid through the Ministry was too soft...of course they should be screened before seeking employment, he might have donated his money to something more worth-while...”

Her voice drifted out of earshot as Bellatrix reached the landing and stormed into the parlor. She slammed the door behind her, not out of any practicality—she remembered Narcissa and Andromeda were following her—but out of the need to express her anger is some way, however trivial, that was stronger than the show of silence she had just given.

Bellatrix threw herself onto the divan, clenching her jaw so furiously she wondered if it would break.

The parlor was hot: a fire burned in the grate and heavy drapes obscured the windows. Bellatrix noticed her hands were balled into fists. With effort, she relaxed them and placed her wand in her robes.

The door creaked open, and Andromeda and Narcissa crept into the room.

“That was excessive.” Andromeda approached Bellatrix as if she were a wounded animal. “Even by his standards. That was ridiculous.”

Bellatrix snorted in bitter laughter. “But isn’t that always what happens?”

“What do you mean?” asked Narcissa, hovering by the fireplace.

“Uncle is a weak leader,” Bellatrix said, enjoying the reckless thrill of voicing her thoughts. “He is passive. He is afraid of everything. He never takes action. I am one of the _best_ witches in my year,” she cried. She felt the need to assert this to someone, at least, if her uncle would not see.

“I know you are, Bella,” said Narcissa.

Andromeda eased closer and sat beside Bellatrix on the divan. “What did he say, Bella—in the heir conversation? He said something downstairs, but I didn’t understand.”

“He did not name either of us,” she told Andromeda. With a sinking in her chest, she wondered what her chances were now. “We heard Cissy yelling, and then nobody was thinking about it anymore.”

Andromeda seemed to hear the uncertainty because she stopped asking.

Bellatrix stared at the fire.

She would become the Black heir. She would force her uncle to give it to her. And the strength, the glory, the reputation, the power, the ability to be _something_ , to know who she was—it would all be hers.

The tongues of flame licked the sides of the stone fireplace.

She refused to become another sulking manor housewife, removed from excitement, magic, politics, and the world at large, surrounded for eternity by other sulking housewives and foul little house-elves.

 _I will be better than that,_ Bellatrix swore to herself. She would find a way to live.

Narcissa spoke up from across the room, tearing Bellatrix from her thoughts.

“I’m sorry for interrupting the heir conversation,” she murmured. Her wide grey eyes reflected the light on the fire.

Bellatrix laughed in spite of herself, curbing the hallow ache inside her chest. “You silly goose,” she groaned, beckoning Narcissa towards her. “I am glad your fearsome screams scared that creature off.”

Smiling up at Bellatrix, Narcissa settled at Andromeda’s feet. She reclined against her knees. Bellatrix watched Andromeda trace her nails through Narcissa’s long, silver hair. The long sheath of it rippled in the firelight.

A question occurred to her. “What did that man say, Cissy, when he threatened you?” she asked. Andromeda’s fingers paused in Narcissa’s hair.

Narcissa glanced back at Bellatrix and Andromeda over her shoulder.

“It was disgusting,” she warned. “You mustn’t tell. I don’t want Mother or Fa—I don’t want to worry Mother with anything like this.”

 Bellatrix waited. Beside her, Andromeda did the same.

Narcissa hunched her legs to her chest before she continued. “He said he would stick his wand in—well, he used a different word—but _inside_ me. He said he would break my body in two and torture me from the inside out. He said he would throw me to the ground and see how it felt taint my pure blood.”

Andromeda’s mouth hung open.

“I will _kill_ him,” Bellatrix said. She couldn’t even tell if she meant it or not, but it was all she could choke beneath her outrage. “See? Uncle should have listened to me. I’ll kill him.”

Andromeda had closed her mouth and found her voice again. “Do not say things like that, Bella.” She lowered it, even though the three of them were alone in the room. “I know the—the stories in the Prophet and the things people are saying, about the rebels, that secret group, and all that—but we shouldn’t give in to their example. Uncle was right about one thing, we are better than vigilantes who are too scared to come out in the open. Hurting that _sick_ man for revenge would make us just as bad as him.”

Bellatrix threw herself to her feet. Andromeda was never on her side. She never got outraged, just got mad at everyone else for trying to act. But Bellatrix couldn’t believe her sister was _defending_ Narcissa’s harasser.

“I have heard the stories too, and I’m not afraid to say their name,” she shot back. “But maybe that vigilante group, or the Death Eaters, or whatever they are, have the right idea! At least they are taking matters into their own hands! _Someone_ needs to stop bastards like the one who harassed Cissy.”

Still sitting on the floor, Narcissa tilted her head up in her signature look of proud composure. “Don’t argue,” she said. “I’m not worried anymore.”

Andromeda stood up, side-stepping Narcissa and ignoring her request. “I’m sure he wasn’t actually Muggle-born,” she repeated.

Bellatrix gaped at her. “That is all you can say right now? He could have hurt Narcissa! What does it matter what he was? He’s on their side!”

“There aren’t sides!” Andromeda cried. “That is just like saying everything that every pure-blood has ever done reflects on you. That man was some horrible, random—”

 “There _are_ sides if they’re ready to attack us!” Bellatrix snapped, feeling like she was explaining to a child.

 “If you talk like that, Bella,” cautioned Andromeda, “you will only feed the frenzy. There will be more paranoia, more distrust, and more unexplained crime against Muggle-borns!”

Bellatrix began to pace, tearing across the heavy rug. Why couldn’t Andromeda understand? Why was everyone so content to be passive, to temper their judgements, to wait, always wait?

 “The crimes and hatred go both ways, Andy,” she breathed, struggling to keep from screaming. “ _You’re_ feeding the frenzy— Stop painting pure-bloods as villains. And stop treating Mudbloods as victims!”

Andromeda froze. “Don’t use that word,” she whispered. “I said we should stop using that word.”

Bellatrix could not hear don’t, to stop, do less one more time. She was strong. She was as strong as the old magic that ran through her veins--her pure blood, a gift from her ancestors. She was a warrior, or at least she would be, she would make herself be.

“Mudblood,” Bellatrix spat. “Mudblood. Mudblood. _Mudblood_.”

Andromeda looked as if Bellatrix had struck her. For a moment Bellatrix felt a fleeting burst of satisfaction. Then there was a slight sinking feeling, uncomfortable. Bellatrix turned, shielding her face.

There was no sound but the crackling of the fire.

“Don’t argue anymore,” said Narcissa, breaking the silence. She stood up to join them. “I don’t care what that man’s blood status was. He was a disgusting pig either way. I don’t care what words you use. But you are both being stupid. That man accosted me, and I don’t want either of you to argue with each other over something that happened to me.”

Andromeda exhaled. She looked towards Bellatrix, as if offering reconciliation. Bellatrix didn’t know how she felt. A fracture had occurred, slight but profound. 

Bellatrix looked away from Andromeda’s apologetic gaze and avoided her eye.

Impervious to her sisters’ lack of an accord, Narcissa tossed her long, white-gold hair.

“I have decided I’m not going to be upset about it anymore,” she said matter-of-factly. “The ministry will find that man and throw him in Azkaban.”

And then, she looked past Andromeda, straight at Bellatrix. “And if they don’t, and I ever need protection, I know my sister will hunt him down.”

Bellatrix looked back at her youngest sister. Narcissa gazed up at her with confidence shining in her face.

Against the burning of her anger, Bellatrix felt a spark of resistance. She smiled.


	3. The Stars and the Dark

The stench of pus and pestilence was alone enough to choke Bellatrix. It did not help that the sight of her father was even more staggering.

Bellatrix could not bear to look at him for more than a second. Since she had been housed at Grimmauld Place for the first part of Easter holiday, today was her first time seeing her father since winter. The sight of him forced her to confront the inevitable: any optimism in letters from their mother had been a lie. Cygnus’s condition had worsened.

The dragon pox had twisted his body into something feeble and grotesque—Cygnus no longer bore any resemblance to the stern, handsome man who had been present all her youth.

Bellatrix also didn’t like to look at her sisters or mother, clustered around his bedside.

Her mother looked worn. The first glimpse of her mother in months had revealed another shock: Druella’s light blonde hair was fading to grey. It somehow seemed antithetical to the austere, domestic control her mother had represented all Bellatrix’s life. Druella was still rigid and controlled in her seat, but wisps of silver hair curled at her temples. Her eyes stared into the distance as if covered by fog.

Placed between Bellatrix and her mother, Narcissa’s pale hands fluttered over pillows, smoothed bedcovers, and sought out her father’s mangled one with own. Her resemblance to Druella was heightened by proximity. She alone had inherited the fair Rosier coloring—Andromeda and especially Bellatrix were Blacks to their cores. The contrast between Narcissa's state and her mother's was also exaggerated. Where Druella looked resigned, Narcissa was attentive. 

Bellatrix had barely spoken to Andromeda since their fight the day before, since they had received their belongings and Apparated back to their own mansion, still angry at her for her lack of support. Andromeda hadn’t given Bellatrix a reason to break the tension: she had been silent in her distress, sitting across from Bellatrix, her full, effusive eyes never leaving Cygnus.

Bellatrix wondered what her own face betrayed.

It was almost a welcome interruption when a squeak cut through the silence of the room.

“An owl just arrived for you, Mr. Black.”

Grateful for the excuse to look away from the wretched scene on the bed, Bellatrix turned to see one of their house-elves, Pokey, standing in the threshold. He was bowed, extending a sealed envelope in his tiny hands.

Druella rose to her feet. “I will give it to him,” she told the elf, who bowed more deeply and departed.

Bellatrix’s mother returned to her spot in the circle.  “A letter, Cygnus,” she said softly, leaning over her husband.

“Give…it…to me…” he rasped.

Druella placed the envelope in his thick, blistered hands.

With a growing dread, Bellatrix recognized the handwriting of the address. The wax seal bore the Black crest: her uncle.

Her father’s welted fingers trembled to open the letter. She watched him scan it.

Andromeda and Narcissa glanced at Bellatrix, but she couldn’t meet their eyes. She didn’t dare to ask what the letter contained.

Wordlessly, her father passed the parchment to her. It shook in his feeble hand. Bellatrix knew what she would see, but it still struck her like a knife to the chest.

The letter contained only two sentences.

_I have named Sirius heir of the Black Family. Sending best wishes for your health, Orion Black._

She read it four times before she realized her breath was coming in audible rasps.

Bellatrix crumpled the letter with furious, shaking fingers. Everyone was looking at her, with pity, with fear, but it was her father’s surveillance that cut the deepest. Even behind his pocked and ruined visage, she could see the shame deep in his face. He remembered, maybe, that she was not a wizard but a witch, and their line would never amount to anything.

Bellatrix had failed him. She had failed.

Bellatrix stood up, her chair screeching on the floor. Ignoring the concerned glances from her assembled family, she strolled out of the sickroom. The door swung shut behind her, and then she was running, running down the hall …

Bellatrix refused to cry. She had not cried in two years. A proper heir would not cry. Crying was unacceptable.

But everything was blurring and burning.

The realization crashed over her again and again. They would not let her be anything. Her purpose had been stolen from her. It had all been for nothing. She was nothing.

It became a ceaseless torrent. _She was nothing, she could never be anything…_

Her wand slashed the air. Once. Twice. Again. Again. The hangings on her wall ripped. Her pillow burst, spilling feathers. The mirror by her armoire shattered with a crash, and fragments of the slivered glass candied the ground.

Bellatrix didn’t remember falling asleep, but she must have, because she remembered the dream.

It was one of the old dreams: all twisting and strangling, full of distorted faces and confusing images. But this was one that recurred, in different forms, in different patterns, but as recognizable in its feeling of terror as it was inevitable.

Bellatrix was somewhere dark but full of noise, full of chaos—a circle where there was no place to hide. There was the smell of blood—was it her blood? Lights flashed, deadly—something had gone horribly wrong, it wasn’t supposed to go like this…

A man was laughing, and he stopped laughing. It wasn’t supposed to go like this…All she felt was the impending terror, and she was running…she was trapped. She was surrounded, and she would lose everything—

She couldn’t move and couldn’t scream. She could the outlines of her bedroom, but all she felt was a collapsing pressure on all her body, suffocating her. She couldn’t cry out. There were a few wild moments of terror, and then her eyes were open.

She was awake.

Her eyes strained against the gloom. She was lying, not beneath her covers, but atop them, curled like a child horizontally in her canopy.

The despair resumed its cavernous shape within her as she remembered where she was. The figure from the dream haunted her, oddly familiar, seeming to peer from the shadows of her closet.

She could have slapped herself. Would a warrior let herself be frightened of a nightmare? Would the heir? But Bellatrix was not the heir. She was nothing.

It must have been the middle of the night, but she could not stay in her room. She tore through the silent, sleeping halls to the place where she could breathe again.

The balcony of Blackhall Manor was cold, but it was better than the suffocation inside. Bellatrix leaned over the stone ledge, her chest expanding in the crisp night air. She stared below her, memorizing the darkened land and distant stars and horizon between. The landscape looked as empty as she felt.

She had nothing; nothing but the fire in her belly and the storm in her brain and her wand in her hand. She always felt steadier with the curved, dependable wood in her grip.

The night air nipped at Bellatrix’s exposed forearms and hands, raising gooseflesh. She savored the sensation and the discomfort. She had always had a high tolerance for pain. It centered her. It drove away the nightmarish laughter, still echoing in her brain.

Bellatrix stared skyward. Hung around a moon just beginning to wane, the stars shone faint and hazy in the purple night. They spelled shapes and names and destinies across the face of the sky. Maybe they had the answers for her.

Bellatrix didn’t know how long she sat on the balcony, numb in the cold, before her mind began to work again. Eventually, though, it did.

She first decided that she would not fling herself off the balcony.

She next decided that she could not curse Orion. At least not yet. She hated him, true. She could now realize, with bitter, burning hatred, that the fool must have sent the letter the moment she had Apparated from Grimmauld Place for it to have arrived today at Blackhall Manor. He could have let her know in person. He could have spoken through the fire. But, ever the coward, he had chosen immortal and impersonal print to notify Bellatrix of her shame. As a final petty gesture, he had addressed it to her father, so she could not even communicate her own failure. She envisioned his face in the darkness and the curses she would like to fling at it. But not yet.

Then, Bellatrix had to decide what to do next, which was harder.

A voice interrupted her solitude before she could summon any conclusion.

“Was it one of the nightmares?”

Bellatrix continued staring forward, but she could feel her sister’s presence behind her: steady and neat, like an elm, like the morning, like something that knew what it was. Bellatrix didn’t want Andromeda’s pity or her gloating. It seemed like a gesture of superiority that Andromeda chose this moment to break their silence. It also rankled Bellatrix that it had been a nightmare, at least in part, and that her sister knew of her weakness.

“Go back inside, Andromeda.”

Bellatrix listened for the sound of retreating footsteps, but none came.

“Are you looking at the stars?” Andromeda asked, ignoring the dismissal. “Do you see mine?”

Bellatrix could have found them if she wanted to, but Andromeda moved first.

“There. The Andromeda constellation.” She pointed at a mass of tangled, distant stars. “They called her the chained maiden. Shall I find yours?”

Bellatrix didn’t answer.

Andromeda sighed, her arm dropping to her side. “What do you want, Bella?”

“What if I told you I wanted to be left alone?” Bellatrix spat, hoping to drive her off.

Andromeda inched closer, placing herself against the ledge, next to Bellatrix. “I would tell you that is not true.”

Bellatrix buried her fingernails in the soft flesh of her right arm. The pain focused her.

“I don’t want to go back inside,” she said at last, and, as if unable to stop herself: “Father is going to die knowing I failed.”

Andromeda’s eyes widened.

It was the first time any of them had dared to say it out loud. But Bellatrix needed to embrace the bleak and hideous unfairness of the world for a moment. Before the hope came back to blind her, she needed to sit in the full, honest darkness without flinching from it. She needed to hold herself in the dark.

“He’s not getting better, Andy.”

 “No,” whispered Andromeda. Bellatrix noticed a silver tear painting her sister’s cheek. “He’s not getting better. He might still have a while, though. Months, maybe. A year.”

Andromeda sniffed, wiping her eyes. “I’ll go back inside in a moment,” she said, striving, Bellatrix knew, to sound steady. “But…”

“But?” Bellatrix asked.

“But I was worried about you, too.”

And that was the difference between them, Bellatrix thought. Andromeda would try to seek out the light, and Bellatrix would teach herself to sit in the dark.

 “How do you feel now?” Andromeda asked tentatively.

Bellatrix hated that question. She felt like screaming. She didn’t know how to put any of it into words, and she didn’t want to say any of it to Andromeda, so she just stared out at the night and let the wind whip her hair against her face.

 At her side, Andromeda shook her head. “There was always the chance that Orion was just going to name his son, as almost everyone before him has. But I know how important this was to you. If it means anything, I think you were more qualified to be heir.”

“I _am_ more qualified,” Bellatrix whispered. She spoke mostly to herself, and maybe the stars if any of them were listening. She didn’t deny that it was reassuring to hear from Andromeda: her sister doted on Sirius, she knew, and Bellatrix half suspected that Andromeda would have sided with him here too.

Encouraged by Andromeda’s validation, Bellatrix let herself voice the thought she had been thinking, like an endless cacophony, since the letter came. “Uncle was about to name me, Andy. I know it. This is all some sick punishment for arguing with him.”

Andromeda hesitated. Bellatrix could see the war her sister waged with herself—she wanted to offer support, but she, too, had disagreed with the Bellatrix’s impetus for arguing with their uncle.

“You were trying to do what you thought was right,” Andromeda said at last. “And that’s all any of us can do.”

Her eyes flicked upward, and Bellatrix wondered if she was looking to her stars for strength, the way Bellatrix did with hers.

“We are living in an uncertain time,” Andromeda murmured. “And things are so dangerous, Bella. Every day, in the paper—more deaths, more disappearances, more demonstrations. I just want to help as many people as I can. But I don’t know who’s right, or if anyone is at all.”

Andromeda’s face looked ghostly in the starlight.

“I see father, who helped to pass a decree that limits the jobs Muggle-borns can hold. Well, it hardly matters, since he grew ill just after, but I know he did it because he thought it was justice for the way Muggles have treated wizards in the past, like he could make up for past inequality. But then I see unemployed, homeless Muggle-borns who are good people, I swear, not the animals we were taught to believe they are—And I don’t know how to help or who to trust.”

“I trust myself,” said Bellatrix. In saying it, she found it was true. She needed to trust herself. If she couldn’t trust herself, she had nothing at all.

She stared at the stars, hoping their brightness would burn their image into her retinas.

 “I trust my magic. I trust my ancestors who gave it to me. I trust that we have been chosen for something, Andy.” She hoped Andromeda understood why she had to believe this with every fiber of her being. “I trust that the hardship our family has endured has made it extraordinary, and us along with it. Our magic is our gift, our culture, our history, our identity, and it is extraordinary.”

She held her eyes shut for a moment. Behind her eyelids, she could see the outline of the stars, pressed in dazzling green and violet.

“That is how I feel about being pure-blood,” Bellatrix said, opening her eyes into the face of Andromeda. She spoke with rising passion and conviction: the stars were on her side, she knew it. “And I _do_ believe it makes us stronger than the rest. And it is something I will treasure. And I will challenge every person who threatens that legacy—all the organizers and Muggle rights activists and _Mudbloods_.”

“I wish you would stop saying that word.”

Andromeda looked cold and unmoved, despite Bellatrix’s impassioned speech. Her face was so like Bellatrix’s own that it was sometimes like looking into a splintered mirror. But tonight, Andromeda looked like a stranger in her sister’s skin.

“Everyone in our family says _Mudblood_.” Bellatrix felt her anger at Andromeda prickle once more. “It’s what they are. What’s wrong with it? Does it scare you?”

There was iron in her sister’s voice when she answered, “The _rumors_ scare me. The talk about raids and weaponizing Dark magic—about vigilantes called _Death Eaters_ —that scares me. That word just makes me sad.”

Bellatrix didn’t take the bait. She had lost many battles in the past two days, but she had won two, albeit small ones: she had conquered a word and won an inch more clarity on herself. She wasn’t about to surrender either victory.

Bellatrix breathed in the scent of the late March air. “Something is coming,” she said. She needed to remind herself. Winter was dying, but the promise of spring, of rebirth, was approaching. She hoped it would come soon.

“Bellatrix,” Andromeda said, and for a moment she sounded again like a child, like the little girl who had clutched for her sister’s hand when she got scared. “I’m afraid of the things that are coming. I’m afraid that our family—” She broke off. “I’m afraid.”

“Then I will protect you,” said Bellatrix. The ferocity of her own voice surprised her. “I will find a way to protect us all.”

“What do you want, Bellatrix?”

It was the second time Andromeda had asked. Bellatrix still felt she didn’t understand the question.

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“Because I don’t know. And _that_ scares me.”

 “I wanted to be heir.” She dared to speak it afresh. The bitterness of the loss swelled around her once more, threatening to overtake her. “That was all I wanted for years.”

“But what now?” Andromeda asked.

Bellatrix didn’t see any point in lying. It was only Andromeda. So, shameful though they were, she said to truest things she could think.

“I want to be extraordinary and strong and powerful. I want to make a difference in the world.”

That was the only conviction she could summon. Her dearest ambition had been wrenched away. Her father was dying. School had nothing for her. Now there was no other option her family would allow for her other than marriage. And the entire world seemed as though it were being fractured apart.

She smiled to herself, a little ironic smile, and let herself say the words, even as she heard how sentimental and naïve and foolish they would sound. “I want to find something to believe in. I suppose.”

Andromeda encircled Bellatrix in a tight embrace. Bellatrix allowed it. She smelled the soap on her sister’s hair and felt her familiar warmth. Some of her anger at Andromeda ebbed away.

“Then you’ll find it, Bellatrix,” Andromeda whispered into her shoulder. “I know it.”

She gave one last squeeze before she drifted back inside, shutting the door unto the balcony behind her.

Bellatrix remained.

_What did she want now? What did she want?_

It took a moment.

Her eyes picked out her star from the purple swath, low in the southwest. The Bellatrix star. The Warrior star. With a flash of bitterness, she remembered it sat on the right shoulder of Orion. The pinprick of light was faint but bright. Upon focus, it shimmered, its colour changing as if with a thousand fractional combustions. That star knew what it was.

She wanted to stop being afraid. She wanted to be something, to do something—and then, it dawned on her. In the strange, liminal space of the balcony, coaxed by the familiarity of the star, her mind seemed to cast backward, plucking a dream that had existed even before she had heard the word of heir.

A picture swan to the forefront of her thoughts: a book that had sat in her father’s study. She had read it before, but she hadn’t understood it then. She had been a child then, but she was a child no longer. She knew she would understand it now.

With a twist of her wand, she breathed, “ _Accio_ book.”

The spell knew which one.

It hurtled toward her from the inner door a moment later. The starlight illuminated the creases in the ancient green leather and the gilt letters spelling, “Magick Moste Evile.”

Bellatrix shivered. It smelled of must and heaviness, of old cracked pages and dusty ink. It smelled of secrets.

A faint tremor, an old breath of excitement, entered her chest.

Bellatrix had never been able to go long without a passion to consume her, without a goal to sustain her. Looking at the book, she realized a new one. If she could not have the power and glory of being heir, she would make the power and glory herself.

Her family, as did many old pure-blood families, had always had a rather flexible tolerance towards what others called Dark Magic, though due to the increasing sympathy towards Muggle-borns, the ancient branch of magic was practiced less. And the secrets of those artifacts and tactics the Blacks chose to share, firstly, with their sons, along with everything else. The Dark Arts had always been an interest for Bellatrix. She had read these books before, sometimes encouraged by her father, getting disapproving looks from Andromeda while she did. The field of study had always been captivating to her, but her interest had still been that of an eager, rebellious child. Now, Bellatrix would approach it with the interest of a formidable witch, with all her considerable passion and skill roused behind her.

The book seemed to sink into her touch, as if accepting her, as if assuring her its knowledge would soon be hers. Not minding that it was the middle of the night and she was freezing and would be boarding the train back to school the following morn, Bellatrix opened the cover.

The pages seemed to flip for her.

“Lumos,” Bellatrix whispered.

The frosty light of her wand fell on an illustration. It was a man, a man screaming and thrashing in pain.

Bellatrix’s fingers traced the lines of the figure, curious, reverent. _The Cruciatus Curse,_ the page was titled. _The Cruciatus Curse._ She turned the sounds and syllables over in her mind, shivering at the lush, dangerous pattern they made. For a moment, Bellatrix saw her uncle’s face where the man’s was. She saw the face of the ungrateful, unqualified, usurping Sirius. She saw a face she imagined—the man who had attacked Narcissa. She saw the hallow, laughing face from her nightmare.

Looking at the image beneath the stars, Bellatrix felt alive for the first time since reading Orion’s fatal letter. The cacophonous emptiness gave way to her new desire. Plans began to unravel in her mind, and the euphoria of having a goal to consume her danced like energy throughout her body. It was like being on fire. She should have thought of it sooner.

She would be a powerful Dark witch, and she would be astonishing to behold.

Heart thumping in her throat, Bellatrix began to read.


	4. Magick Moste Evile

Bellatrix’s first week back at the castle would have been one from hell had it not been for her private course of study to save her.

She drifted through her classes, paying even less attention than she usually did. It didn’t matter. When had school ever been enough for her? When had a classroom lesson ever satisfied her? Now, she could barely sit through the superior, fear-mongering droning of professors that seemed to comprise all her studies.

She felt as if her armor had been thrown away. She was vulnerable. When she walked through the corridors or sat in the Great Hall, she was visible but not desirable, looked at but not respected. The chatter, even when it wasn’t cruel, tore at her like carrion crows.

A week after Easter break, dueling club resumed, and she had the chance to vent some of her frustrations.

Bellatrix’s wand wrenched the air. A jet of red flashed.

Across from her, Evan parried. _“Protego!”_ His brow sweat, and his mouth tightened in a strained line.

Grinning, Bellatrix tried again, and again. Her chest heaved. The lights from her wand lit the air. She heard murmurs from the quiet crowd, and the words Evan said: jinxes, curses, hexes, most of them whizzing past her.

Bellatrix didn’t need to speak at all—admittedly, sometimes when she was defending, she wasn’t quite quick enough to produce every spell nonverbally, and sometimes the excitement swept her up so shouting spell names seemed inconsequential. But even when her curses flew easily and silently, she didn’t like to stay totally mute.

“Hey Evan,” she jeered, dodging a spell and retaliating with a blasting curse. “You call that a hex?” She laughed as a jet of blue light shot past her nose. “Your aim is so bad I worry for the people on the sidelines!”

He tensed and redoubled his efforts, slashing and swiping.

Bellatrix loved facing Evan Rosier at dueling club: he was one of the only ones who stood a chance against her. She pinned it down to good genetics, as he was her cousin on her mother’s side. She only wished she could rally him to taunt back. Dueling Club was organized by the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor—this year, a dry, stern young woman named Bones who had temporarily taken the class as a favor to Dumbledore. Occasionally, Bellatrix’s penchant for jeering while fighting earned her a disapproving word from Bones, but she waved it off. Dueling was always more fun when insults flew as frequently as the curses.

Despite his intensified attempt, Evan was no match for her.

She saw a chink in his defense and struck. “ _Incarcerous_!”

Before he could block, ropes appeared, whipped around him, and stiffened. From his limp, bound hand, his wand clattered to the floor.

Bones signaled the end of the match. For a single, shining moment, Bellatrix half expected the watching crowd to burst into applause, but—of course—they did not. They wouldn’t have anyway, but since the news of her pitiful, nine-year-old cousin’s supplantation had spread, there was no hope for it. After the excitement of the match, Bellatrix felt listless amid the swarm of people once more.

As she slouched off the dueling floor, she was greeted by the reedy, freckled form of Timothy Nott.

“Well done, Black.” He stuck out his hand for her to shake. She took it. One of the perhaps four people to whom Bellatrix spoke apart from her sisters, she appreciated the congratulations—though she suspected an ulterior motive.

“How much did I win you?”

He grinned. “Only four galleons. Barely anyone cares to bet against you these days.”

She snorted. “Who did?”

“Take your bloody money,” groused Macnair, appearing from behind her and slapping coins into Nott’s hand. Crude, jocund, and the worst student of her acquaintances, Macnair cut a sharp contrast to Nott’s dry-humored wit. Physically, they were also opposites: Nott was neat and slim; Macnair was unkempt, burly, and supplicant to the wispy mustache he had been trying and failing to grow for two years.

With a churlish smirk, Macnair indicated the place Evan stood conversing across the hall. “Don’t know why you, Nott, of all people, bet against beloved _Evan…_ ”

“Four galleons is less than nothing,” said Bellatrix, though she still felt triumphant as she watched the exchange of money in her name. She wasn’t heir, but at least she was still a better duelist than all the rest.

Macnair snorted. “It’s the bloody pride of the thing that counts.”

Nott slipped the coins cheerily into his pocket. “Thank you.”

He glanced towards Evan as well.

Her cousin stood out from the throng of dark robes. Like Narcissa, Evan had the cream complexion and fair hair of the Rosiers, and the light coloring accented his fine, sculpted features. Even in defeat, he moved with a sarcastic gracefulness.

“As for betting against dear, dear, _beloved_ Evan,” quipped Nott, directing his focus back to Macnair, “well, I happen to be a better gambler than you, and I never let personal matters interfere with my—”

They were disrupted by people congregating to watch the next match. Rita, a shrill seventh year that Bellatrix disliked, squealed to her friend as she pushed by them.

Shunted to the side, Bellatrix glared first at Rita and then at the dueling floor. “Who’s next?”

“Bloke named Ted Tonks,” scowled Macnair, eyes still on Nott’s jangling pocket. He muttered, “Some _Mudblood_ bastard who thinks he something, facing…who even knows.”

Bellatrix looked up. A boy with sandy hair was beaming at the students assembled to watch him duel. She thought she had seen him before at the club, but she had rarely taken note. She rarely stayed to watch duels that were not her own—the other students tended not to speak to her anyway.

Now that she thought about it, Bellatrix fancied this boy’s face might seem a little slow, stupid maybe, certainly not worthy of so much attention. He was likely a terrible duelist, she told herself, and she could best him in a second with her pure-blood prowess.

The boy—Tonks—bowed to his opponent, a round-faced girl Bellatrix thought she recognized.

“What is that girl?”

“Her?” Macnair examined her. “Alice something…”

“Is she,” Bellatrix asked in a low voice, “is she a Mudblood too?”

Nott entered the discussion with a shrug. “Pure, I think, actually. But not one of the _old_ families, if you catch my meaning.”

They were joined on the fringes by Evan, lazily massaging his wrists where they had been bound.

Evan was accompanied by the last of Bellatrix’s cohort: Rodolphus Lestrange, shaking his dark, chin-length hair out of his face. The students parted around him: though not tall or particularly striking, Rodolphus operated with a combination of single-minded focus and inscrutability that incited wariness. He was quiet enough that people tended to listen when he spoke–though Bellatrix often wondered if he was quiet merely because he was stupid. She sometimes fancied his blankness was misinterpreted as stoicism due to his—not unpleasing—muscularity. It had once pleased her, she supposed, during their courting days, before she had grown bored with his otherwise entirely predictable attentions. But, she scolded herself, those were reflections for another time.

Evan offered Bellatrix a conciliatory hand to shake, focusing her thoughts onto him and away from Lestrange. “Well played,” he smirked.

“You as well,” replied Bellatrix, though she swatted his hand aside. She paused. “I did mean what I said about your aim. You would improve if you only…”

His smirk grew more strained, and she stopped speaking.

“Good match,” commented Rodolphus in his monotone. “I’ve seen you practically murder your cousin at every dueling club, but that—”

“Shut it,” said Evan neatly.

It occurred to Bellatrix that perhaps they were being unusually complimentary because they pitied her for losing out on her inheritance. She hadn’t thought of it until now—it made her cheeks burn. She had never been the subject of pity before and found she didn’t at all like it.

The group ambled away from the current duelists and spectating students to a corner of the Great Hall. The spot was punctuated by the red rays of the setting sun, blazing down from the high windows and the ceilings.

Bellatrix eyed the four boys before her. These were her compatriots. Though occasionally trying, she valued their respect. Did they now see her as lesser since she had failed to secure the title of heir? All the others were first-borns, now come of age, and doubtless they would be named imminently or already had been. As was typical of their rank, they would all celebrate the naming with inheritance parties. It made her stomach clench, but she pushed the feeling away—she had a private goal of her own to which none of the others were privy.

“Any of you facing off tonight?” asked Bellatrix with a proud toss of her hair, compensating for the pity she feared they held.

Lestrange shook his head. “I face Rab next week.”

“Sibling rivalry,” noted Evan. His light hair flared in the glow of the setting sun. “If you lose, I fear I shall laugh uncontrollably.”

“And,” Macnair interjected, rubbing his hands together with glee “next week Mr. Rosier faces Mr. Nott. Which, as we know, won’t be the first time they’ve met up to do a little _wand work_ …”

Evan looked impassive, and Nott rolled his eyes good-naturedly. The others traded amused, worn looks—it was now common knowledge Evan and Nott had been seen snogging at Slughorn’s most recent party, and Macnair was customarily overeager to capitalize on any gossip he could. Bellatrix was rather tired of it.

“If _you_ ever kiss anyone, Macnair,” she sneered, “do let us know. I would think _your_ wand would be going soft, having never been used, but I guess you fiddle around with it yourself enough to compensate.”

Macnair, who had been idly toying his actual wand at his side, flushed and stuffed it into his pocket. The others hooted, and Bellatrix laughed merrily.

“It seems none of us is dueling further tonight,” Evan said, cutting through the sniggers. “Let’s get out of this foul club, then.”

They strolled out of the Great Hall, Evan leading the way. As they rounded the staircase to the dungeon corridor, Bellatrix felt Lestrange move to walk at her side.

“Are you doing anything tonight, Bellatrix?” he asked as they clattered down the steps.

“Oh ho ho,” chuckled Macnair from the front of the group, regaining some of his amusement. “I don’t think Rod would say no to a little more _wand work_ with you, Black, if you catch my meaning—”

“Shut up, Macnair,” Lestrange said, but a dull ruddiness had crept over his face. “Nott had some brilliant plans, or something.”

Would Macnair ever let her or Rod live down their long-dormant tryst, she wondered? Uneager to engage with the tease, Bellatrix turned her head to look at Nott, walking behind her. His teeth glinted in the light of a passing torch.

“Some second-year smuggled in a barrel of firewhisky from Hogsmeade and was kind enough to inform everyone in the immediate vicinity. I merely proposed we swipe it and drink our spoils on the grounds.” He laughed, “Honestly, it would be in everyone’s best interest. It would be child protection. He should thank us.”

They emerged from the stairway and fanned to fill the breadth of the corridor, approaching the common room.

Bellatrix cocked her head. “Don’t care to.”

The others looked at her.

“Why not?” asked Macnair, as if gorging oneself on stolen firewhisky was the paragon of human enjoyment. “It’s brilliant. This sounds like something you’d love, Black. You haven’t cared to do anything since coming back. If you’re still pouting from—”

Evan shot him a warning look, and Macnair fell into a surly silence. Bellatrix regarded him with a chilling glare, taking in his twitching mouth and deep under-eye shadows.

“Watch yourself,” she said.

“My apologies,” he muttered.

The truth was not that Bellatrix was pouting.

The truth was that Bellatrix had devoted her nights to her study of the Dark Arts.

There was no reason she had to keep this a secret from her companions, save that she liked it, and wanted it to be her own.

In the week since Bellatrix had been back in the castle, she had made staggering progress in her new field: devouring her book, committing its words to memory, scribbling a frenzy of notes, understanding theory in a way she never had before. It was almost uncanny how quickly she took to the material. And tonight, she would push her study to new excellence. Bellatrix had a plan. Tonight, her study would become no longer just theoretical, but practical.

So long as she wasn’t retching from drink and snogging Macnair, anyway—that was surely his plan; there had been a singular incident in their 6th year, fueled then by considerable amounts of firewhisky. No such incident would ever occur again without similarly blinding levels of intoxication.

 “It just sounds terribly juvenile,” she said to allay any suspicions. “I wish there was some _real fun_ around here.”

“What do you mean by _real fun_?” asked Evan with a half-cocked smile.

 _Practicing the Dark Arts_ , she thought to herself, but out-loud said, “I will know when I see it, I expect.”

“Pure-blood,” Lestrange told the door, and it swung open to admit them.

Bellatrix crossed to stand by the wide window. Something flashed behind it, and she tensed. She loved to catch glimpses of the unidentified creatures that blossomed through the murky depths.

“What shall we do then?” asked Nott to the group at large.

Macnair set his hands on his hips. “I’m still keen to do the—” he dropped his voice, with a glance towards the other Slytherins scattered throughout the room— “ _the firewhisky scheme._ ”

Evan, lounging on a chair, shrugged. “I haven’t anything better to do.”

“Might as well,” said Lestrange. He glanced to Bellatrix. “Black’s the only one out, then.”

While they waited, the group collectively recounted the highlights of that night’s dueling club. After the conversation faltered, the four boys trooped to their dormitory to make their plans. Bellatrix summoned a book and read. The lake outside grew gloomier in the increasing darkness, and with every inch of oncoming night, excitement pulsed through her, heightening her senses.

It had been that way for the week. Every day was the same: tedious, laughable, isolating. She would tap her feet and wait for night to fall. But in the night, Bellatrix would come alive again in her private plans.

It went thus: the sun set, and she lay in wait like a crouching serpent. While the other seventh year girls entered the dormitory, chattered, and dimmed their lights, she feigned sleep. She waited until the collective breath in the room was deep and slow. Then she drew forth the tome, lit her wand, and read. In the past week, the dark room and its inanimate inhabitants had become her private palace. The common room too, if it was empty, became filled with her practicing and planning. She danced amid the ashes of the day’s fire and the shadows of the lake, pouring over all the Dark Arts literature she could find. She drank in the words.

_Avada Kedavra…blood magic…fiend fire…basilisk venom…the runes for flesh and blood and bone…_

They stirred her. They moved her.

That night, she had something special planned.

The beginning of the process followed its usual forms. Bellatrix waited until the rustling from Ester Flint dissipated into nothing but the sounds of night. When Astrid Fawley’s mutters subsided into snores, Bellatrix shook off her covers. She laced her feet into her familiar boots. Careful not to wake the others, she tiptoed to her wardrobe, but they did not stir. They were creatures of daylight and simplicity, unlike her. She was a being of night and shadow and starlight and flame.

Bellatrix pried open her wardrobe—the hinges creaked, but then all was once again silent. Over her nightdress, she shimmied into a pair of robes. She gripped her wand in her eager fingers and, with her arm, cradled _Magick Moste Evile_ to her chest.

And then she reached for the strangest item of all: a sealed vial entrapping a fluttering grey moth. The vial had once been a required item for Potions; she had taken it to the grounds earlier that day and summoned the creature from where it had lain, mottled against the bark of a poplar tree. She was relieved it hadn’t died in the hours it had sat sealed in her wardrobe—she needed it alive. As she clutched the jar in her left hand and exited the dormitory, she could hear the rapid sounds of the moth’s pulsating wings battering the glass, like the unfurling of a lady’s fan.

Creeping up the stars to the common room, Bellatrix asked herself, as she had each nightly ritual, what she would do if someone stood at the top. But, as it had been every day thus far, no one did.

She placed the jar and book on a side table.

First, Bellatrix twisted her wand on herself. The queer, slipping sensation of the Disillusionment Charm slid over her skin. She had decided, in the case someone was in the common room, that a floating book would be harder to explain than her _holding_ the book, so she always waited until she was secure in the room to enact the spell. She could not apply the charm to her book—it would be impossible to read—but she did tap the jar. The charm slithered over the jar’s surface until it mirrored its surroundings. The moth, fighting against the confines of its now-invisible prison, looked frenzied atop the naked dark wood.

Bellatrix flicked to the familiar place in the book. She had cross-checked the information against three sources, even stooping to peruse her class-assigned Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook. The irony was not lost on her. She had torn the relevant page from the textbook and trapped it between entries in _Magick Moste Evile_.

She smoothed the torn page:

_…long regarded as perhaps the most terrible of the Unforgivable Curses, the Cruciatus Curse (incantation: “Crucio!”) has been illegal in Britain since 1701. The curse renders the object unimaginable pain. Long exposure to the spell may even cause permanent magical injury or insanity in the receiver of the curse. However, with evidence from multiple sources, the curse is also cited as sometimes having adverse effects on the castor of the spell. These effects can partially be explained by the psychological toll of subjecting another creature to such pain and distress. Yet, it has been argued that this spell’s intense emotional demands to produce effect are exhaustive and unpredictable, like all Unforgivable Curses and much of the Dark Arts. Unlike simple incantations (ex. “Lumos”) which almost always produce effect with combination of word, gesture, and functioning instrument, regardless of the castor’s thoughts and intent, The Cruciatus Curse demands a specific state to execute with success. It is theorized that a wizard frequently accessing said state to produce the curse puts himself at risk. Familiarization with the state may have a damaging long-term effect on the wizard._

_Or witch,_ Bellatrix thought, glancing it over again.

The page had one important piece of information: this fabled state, apparently “damaging” to the castor. Bellatrix thought the damage unlikely—silly, goody-two shoes book. The rest of the entry was full of fear-mongering and ignorance, just like the rest of Hogwarts. Its heavy-handed message was “only learn enough to know that you should never attempt it.” She could have done with more specifics: what did the pain feel like? How did it create insanity? Was it “forgivable” in cases of self-protection? And what would it feel like to be in that state? To hold that power inside her…

She bit though her budding excitement to reexamine the Cruciatus Curse entry in _Magick Moste Evile_. Floral, archaic language illustrated the different modes of the curse—it was apparently possible to manipulate the level to which the object felt pain, employing a lighter casting or intensifying the spell, or to concentrate the pain in the bones or muscles or skin. While intriguing, _Magick Moste Evile’s_ description still lacked in practical application. At least it assumed the reader was a castor or curator, rather than a sweet, innocent defendant. Hiddenly, this passage also referenced a “state” necessary to execute the spell. Bellatrix couldn’t imagine how it might feel in effect. But she would find out.

That was enough reading. She looked from the book. With her invisible hands, she unscrewed the invisible jar.

“ _Immobilus,”_ she whispered before the moth could rouse itself to escape and cupped it into her palm. It felt feathery, strange; at first, she had to fight not to fling it away. Its antennae were like leaves, faint and veined. Thin black stripes crossed its cylindrical body, and its wings were gossamer webs. The more she studied it, she began to find it almost pretty in its alien strangeness. She had the wild intrusive thought that it reminded her of Narcissa. Unsettled, she pushed the thought from her mind. Sentiment would not make her work any easier.

She looked once more—at the main entrance to the common room, at the stair to the dormitories, at the lake windows and the fireplaces and the abandoned chairs and tables—but she was alone.

Her wand quivered beneath her buzzing fingers. Keeping the moth lightly pinched in her left hand, Bellatrix lifted the immobilization and instead fixed it to the table with a Sticking Charm. She would need to see the moth’s motion to measure her success. The moth’s wings beat in protest, but its slender legs stayed put, bound to the wood.

Bellatrix practiced the wand movement once—it was a curve and a wrench, a lure and a tug. She had deduced the motion from advice that her Defense textbook offered those trying to repel the curse and from another book she had obtained from the Restricted Section, trusting her credit as a Black to secure it—which it had. She had then, for a moment, been stalled, unsure how to practice the spell, before realizing any living thing would suffice. She knew the wand movement, she knew the incantation, she had an object. There was nothing left but to try it.

Bellatrix lowered the tip of her wand to the struggling moth.

“ _Crucio_.”

The whispered word felt delicious and verboten as it spun from her tongue. It seemed to slide into the hush of the room, sinful and scintillant, wrong and utterly, utterly _right_. She could be expelled for this.

But the moth did not respond. Its wings continued murmuring, unchanged—was it perhaps affected, unbeknownst to her? She thought she would have felt something. No, it couldn’t have worked.

She inhaled, coalescing her strength. Her focus bored into the moth.

“ _Crucio.”_

She thought perhaps it quivered. But still, it showed no symptoms of excruciating pain, and she felt no different.

Bellatrix sunk into herself. She picked the magic from her blood, coursing, lapping, streaking through her veins. Her pure, old, magic blood. She communed with the slow-burning embers in her stomach, the yearning that lived in the hallow spot of her throat. She recalled her conviction: she would master this, as she had mastered everything in her path. Should she ever need it, she wanted the power to cause pain.

“ _Crucio.”_ This time, the moth paused. Its wings halted, and it seemed to lower, as if her spell had buffeted it, as if it were momentarily stunned by a collapsing swell of wind.

A smile shot across her face. A partial spell was always a good omen.

Bellatrix considered that she _might_ feel slightly different. She felt almost as if she had been drinking wine—flushed and heady, perhaps, though it was hard to tell if the sensation stemmed from her adrenaline or the spell.

Perhaps she merely needed to drink in excess to cast the Cruciatus Curse successfully. Perhaps she should have downed the firewhisky with the boys after all—she allowed herself a soft giggle at that.

Thinking she might as well try continually until she achieved success, Bellatrix swept her wand at the moth, still smiling. “ _Crucio_.”

The moth flinched, decidedly—Bellatrix sprang up, thinking she had cast the spell—but then it acted as it had before, couching as if she had blasted it with air, before resuming its wing beating.

Bellatrix dropped her arm, exasperated. It was almost funny—never had it taken her more than four attempts to produce a full spell. She thought through what she knew: it seemed that conviction, as it so often did in spell work, aided the casting. Focus, obviously, was instrumental. And her own amusement had produced something that seemed stronger…

Was that the secret of the curse? _Laughter_? It was infernal _Riddikulus_ all over again.

Bellatrix was learning that Dark magic was slippery. For one, the spells were all unfettered and unstandardized, though that was part of the thrill. Bellatrix was of the school of thought that all spells should be out of the Ministry’s control, but that was another matter. The Dark Arts were not for everyone. There something ritual and elemental and _exclusive_ about them. And one’s feelings were always part of the work, not hovering below the spoken incantation, not sliding around it, but _driving_ it. Bellatrix found that _that_ was something she was good at. She had never excelled at subduing her own strength of feeling.

After half an hour, Bellatrix could make the moth tremble for a full moment before the curse slipped away. She almost pitied it. Bellatrix had to give herself credit for that level of achievement, with no guidance, no stimulus, and the restrictions of working silently and secretly, fearing someone might interrupt at any moment. But still, it was not success.

In the common room, in the dark, she tried again and again. She stood. She stretched. She paced. She did jumping-jacks. She tried pretending someone was attacking her and spent a great deal of time trying to catch herself unawares, doing mental exercises and reciting nonsense under her breath. She whispered the word, again and again and again

Her blood boiled. An hour more had passed, and she could still achieve nothing more than a flicker of the spell. The moth seemed untroubled. It had even stopped beating its wings. Perhaps it slept. Somewhere, Bellatrix’s pity for the creature had died. She _hated_ that moth. It took on a character in her mind: she fancied it was laughing at her. It curled an antenna coyly. It sounded like her mother. Bellatrix wished that there could exist one thing in her life that obeyed her without her having to pull out her own teeth. If she could not master the Dark Arts, she truly would be nothing—

Bellatrix tore at her own hair, feeling like knocking her head against the wall. But she could not give up. She scuffed her sleepy eyes and forced herself to focus. There was a stain on the table. It looked like a face. The image spurred something.

Bellatrix remembered the faces she had envisaged when first looking at the page of _Magick Moste Evile._ Her cousin, her uncle, her nightmare, the Mudblood…they congealed in her mind. A new monstrous face reared its ugly head: _powerlessness_. Bellatrix thought of this monster. She thought of her frustrations. She thought of the gentle buzzing sensation in her skull. She thought of the swirling, yawning darkness, her thrill of the Dark Arts, her delight. The sensations blurred into fuel. A fire flickered.

And Bellatrix knew, when she said the word this time, she would cast the spell.

“ _Crucio_ ,” she whispered.

The moth shuddered. It shuddered as though it were being dissected by a needle. She felt a surge of pleasure, of triumph, of glee, of fury. _So this is the state_ , Bellatrix thought, and from the depths of her belly, she began to laugh. The moth continued to tremble—it was disconcerting, but she made herself watch, sustaining the spell. She had done it, she had done it, _she had done it_.

That night, she cast the curse twice more. It felt as natural as breathing. She found she no longer hated the moth, in fact…

When Bellatrix had finished, she crept from the common room, up the stairs, and, still camouflaged, glanced to and fro in the deserted entrance hall. She could feel her heartbeat in her hands. She spotted a window, pried it open, and, gently, gently, gently, released the creature into the dying, yellowish night. Like some ghostly specter, the moth flitted away over the grounds. She felt a swell of gratitude for the creature. It really was beautiful, after all. Bellatrix wished it well.

That night, her dreams were full of laughter and beating wings.

 


	5. The Invitation

In the coming weeks, Bellatrix let her nightly pursuits consume her.

Each morning, she woke later. She missed class, she missed dueling club, she missed meals. If any of Bellatrix’s fellows had noticed a change, they said nothing, though she occasionally caught Andromeda looking at her with concern. But Bellatrix waved it off; her sister’s concern paled with the desire to plot her next great adventure.

She recalled her childish fascination with Morgan le Fey. Perhaps the Dark Arts had always been her calling: strong, old, elemental magic, magic that didn’t trouble itself with “right” or “wrong.” In her novice attempts to access the darkness within herself, she had felt more powerful than the Black family had ever allowed her to feel. She had found something indelible and forbidden and thrilling. She had found a secret she could keep forever, to sustain her through whatever the uncertainty of her future might hold.

Bellatrix had found a way to be powerful, in spite of everything else.

The days became a waiting game. The occasional task presented itself: Could she smuggle another tome from the library? She had a minute between classes—could she sneak a nap to ensure her strength for the night?

Bellatrix had always liked the night better than the day, anyway.

Great and terrible magic occupied her mind. And, all around, the other students of Hogwarts went on, blithely and foolishly, in a world that seemed increasingly distant from hers.

“I’m so nervous for my O.W.L.s, quiz me on the proper handling of a Mandrake for Herbology again...” Bellatrix overheard while she lounged in the common room, practicing the wand movement for the Imperius curse under the table.

“Did you hear that Alice is going out with Frank? I know! She told me last night…” a group of passing boys gabbed while she was sitting in the Great Hall during breakfast, memorizing the properties of Inferi.

“New Hogsmeade trip this weekend! Let’s go; we could grab a drink at the Three Broomsticks…” someone told their friend while she scanned the Daily Prophet for any mention of the recent attacks using the Dark Arts.

It went on and on, idle and infuriating…

“Any chance you go to a party with me?” someone called down the corridor as she walked towards Potions in the dungeon room.

“Oi! Bellatrix! Any chance you go to a party with me?

She whipped around at the sound of her name. Rodolphus was standing behind her, eyebrowed cocked.

“Sod off, Lestrange.” She continued towards her classroom.

“Good to see you too, Black.” He jogged up to join her, dodging a bespectacled 4th year as he did. “Why don’t I see you anymore?”

“Why don’t you ask little Miss Greengrass?”

He flinched. Bellatrix savored her victory.

Truly, she didn’t care in the least about Eleanora Greengrass; Greengrass had been nothing but the means to an end.

Bellatrix and Rodolphus had been more or less courting—more sex, less courting—and Bellatrix had felt so desperate and bored one day, she had looked for any excuse to end it. Rodolphus had chanced to glance at Eleanora, and Bellatrix had seized upon it. She had ended things between them then and there—very loudly in a seventh-floor corridor, as it so happened. Bellatrix reflected that it had cured her boredom, but none of her desperation. As dull and uninspired as Rod was, there were hardly any other more palatable options.

“I don’t know how Eleanora is,” he said, squaring his jaw. “I broke it off.”

Bellatrix fished for something else stymie him. “You want to go to a party?”

“Why not? Don’t sneer at me like that. Your sister’s going.”

Bellatrix arched her eyebrows. “Andromeda’s going? What is this, one of Slughorn’s parties?” She looked him up and down. “Even for you, Lestrange, that’s pathetic.”

He shook his head. “It’s a party at my father’s house. And not the middle one, the youngest one—blonde hair, pretty—”

“Narcissa,” she interrupted him. “Watch your tongue.”

He shot her an embarrassed grin. “Right,” he said. “Lucius is going, and he’s asked her.”

Bellatrix scoffed; she knew he hung about Lestrange, but she had always found Malfoy to be an incorrigible prick.

“But if you went,” Rodolphus tried to arrange his face into something charming, “you could go with me.”

“What kind of party is this?” Bellatrix asked.

She didn’t mind parties—often times, she enjoyed them, especially when they featured her society rather than the sort parties like Slughorn’s attracted.

Lestrange had been watching her face. “It’s…well, it’s sort of a celebration. It’s…I’ve been named heir.”

A week ago, these words would have cut out Bellatrix’s heart. But now, she only felt a twinge of bitterness. It was her private study of the Dark Arts that shielded her, she thought. She had found another fire to sustain her.

Rodolphus ruffled his hand through his dark hair. “It isn’t really a surprise, because it’s just me and Rab, but I’ve just been named officially. My mum planned it, dinner and dancing, I think, in line with the old ways. The people I like from the old families will be there, so I thought you should be there too.”

Bellatrix considered. Going was tempting. Her attendance would signify that she had resumed the mantle of her house, even in light of her uncle’s folly. However, it would mean taking a night off from reading and practicing.

“When?”

“Friday—day after tomorrow.” He grinned. “Beltane. My mum sent a single letter to Old Sluggy, and that was all it took for the old buffoon to allow us free passage in and out of the castle for the night.”

Bellatrix didn’t answer right away.

To attend with Rod would have the dual effect of likely marking them as a couple on the path to marriage. If she had been named heir, there had been the chance she could have resisted the crushing pressure to make a match, but that day had passed. She could swallow her pride and declare herself engaged to Lestrange right now. She didn’t mind him, truly; He was like a simple, quasi-incestuous brother, uninspired but reliable, and not unattractive. He had never done anything unkind or ungentlemanly towards her, save that which she had asked him to do to her. There was no reason to deny the inevitable, expect for the feeling in her chest that shuddered at the possibility—it was too soon, it was too much, she hadn’t done enough herself yet. She couldn’t become someone else’s wife.

Lestrange took advantage of her silence to lean close to her.

“If you need more persuasion,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’ve got something to show you.”

His words stole her out of her reverie. In spite of herself, Bellatrix felt herself lean in too. His lowered voice made her suspect secrets, which never failed to excite her.

“Are you trying to seduce me, Lestrange?” she murmured.

He was close enough to touch.

“I wasn’t…” he muttered, concealing his excitement poorly, “But if that’s the result…”

He drew closer…and closer…She held herself still, letting him believe she would give it to him—then she pulled away at the last second with a soft laugh.

Lestrange puckered up to the air, looking foolish. She could feel his disappointment staining his desire.

“I hope whatever you have to show me is better than that,” she grinned, tossing her hair. “What is it?”

Lestrange scowled, but then a glint entered his eye. “I’ll only tell you if you agree to go to the party.”

“Oh, someone knows how to play,” Bellatrix jeered—though internally she delighted. He was on form today, better than he’d been in months. He was almost at her level of sport, though not quite.

She inclined her head, careful not to give him more satisfaction than he deserved. “I suppose I could stop by.”

“I’ll hold you to it.”

The bell tolled. Distantly, Bellatrix remember she was supposed to go to her Potions class. But the temptation of Lestrange’s secret was more exciting by far.

“So,” she said, fingers tapping on her arms, “show me whatever it is.”

“Always liked it when you ordered me around, Black.”

“Then I order you to tell me.” She was losing patience for games.

Something flickered across Rodolphus’s face. “Malfoy has it.”

Bellatrix stared, exasperated. “What in Salazar’s name is this? What is ‘it’ and why do I have to see Malfoy?”

She had expected Rodolphus to reply with another quip. She had not expected him to fidget, looking suddenly uneasy. His hands fingered his arm, then fell back at his side, continuing to twitch.

“Just—ask Malfoy about it when you see him next, alright?”

Rodolphus glanced over his shoulder. Bellatrix followed his line of sight; she saw only the empty stretch of dungeon corridor. The torches burned in their brackets, illuminating nothing but the shadows and the stone walls. They were alone.

Bellatrix regarded Rodolphus closely, looking for some explanation to his strange behavior, but his dark eyes were as blank and inscrutable as ever.

“Alright,” she answered him slowly, still searching his face. “I suppose I’ll go see Lucius. And I’ll see you in two days for your party.”

Rodolphus gave her a curt nod. Then he swung around and walked back up the corridor and out of sight. He did not glance back.

Bellatrix watched him go. She wondered what he wanted to show her—that was the first secret. But behind this, Bellatrix suspected she had caught glimpse of a second secret, more enticing than the first.

She wondered what Lestrange was hiding.


	6. Malfoy’s Secret

Bellatrix didn’t have long to wait before another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Evening had fallen, and she sat with Narcissa in the common room.

Bellatrix was trying an experiment. She had felt like being slightly bolder in her pursuit of the Dark Arts. What was the use in becoming a formidable Dark sorceress if she couldn’t impress anyone else with her accolades? The bulk of her training she would still restrict to the nights, of course, but if she chanced to read in the open, what was the harm in that? Yes, the Dark Arts were treated with suspicion bordering on hostility, but no one could prove anything if they happened to just see her reading a book. But they might start to wonder…might start to mention their wonderings about her in the hushed tones she loved…might spread their whispers and avoid crossing her in the future…

Bellatrix turned a page of _Spells Forbidden_ , her newest acquisition, relishing at the crinkling sound the frail page made beneath her fingers. All Dark Arts books were ancient, as far as she could tell. It was just another aspect that made Bellatrix feel as though the entire field of study had been designed for her.

Narcissa hadn’t blinked at Bellatrix’s choice of reading material. She been too busy celebrating that both she and Bellatrix would be allowed to leave the grounds to attend Rodolphus’s party the night after next. Her talk was all about dress robes and hairstyles and _Lucius_.

Bellatrix nodded along, though her mind was occupied elsewhere: it danced between her reading and the puzzling encounter with Lestrange she’d had earlier that day. What had made him look so nervous? What did Narcissa’s precious Lucius, of all people, have to show her? And why couldn’t Rod have shown her himself?

Narcissa was now perusing her History of Magic homework. Her hand drifted across the parchment, sporadically writing down notes from her book, though Bellatrix wondered if her sister’s mind was elsewhere, too.

Bellatrix stiffened. She had flipped to a promising page: it was a more complete description of the Killing Curse than she’d so far been able to find. Since she had mastered Crucio, she had looked to this next Unforgivable, though it still seemed beyond her realm to practice. Though exhilarating to study. She began to devour the page, her pulse quickening—

The book was snatched out of her hands.

“Charming fare appropriate for a young girl of the House of Black, I trust?” a voice drawled.

Bellatrix’s wand was drawn in a second, though she pointed it lazily. She would have recognized that voice anywhere.

“Don’t make me hex you, Malfoy.”

He sneered but handed her back the book. He was afraid of her, she knew. Two years her junior, he could be boastful to annoyance but was careful not to cross her. Which was wise.

Bellatrix looked at the slight, arrogant boy before her—would he tell her now, here, whatever Rod had been so reticent about?

But Malfoy wasn’t looking at her; his eyes were trained on Narcissa, looking very pretty as she bent over her book.

Malfoy smoothed back his already slick blonde hair.

Seeing this, Bellatrix idly wondered if he pursued her sister because of his own vanity. He and Narcissa had similarities: the icy colouring, blonde hair, and light eyes, but also their reserve, and the elegance—which Bellatrix conceded Cissy had in spades, but Malfoy merely pretended at, with his father’s new-money political connections.

“Hello, Narcissa,” said Malfoy, his voice unctuous.

“Hello, Lucius,” replied Narcissa. She barely raised her eyes from her scratching quill, though the hint of a pleased smile curved her mouth.

Bellatrix rolled her eyes. She had no patience for the tepidity of insipid, courtly flirtation.

“Malfoy—” she said.

His chin tilted upwards in exaggerated deference. Bellatrix realized she didn’t know how to broach the subject.

“I heard—” she began, then abandoned it. She had never had much patience for subtlety. “Lestrange told me I should ask you about something.”

Narcissa peered up from her parchment, looking at Bellatrix with confusion, but Lucius began to grin superiorly as Bellatrix continued,

“He said that you have something to show me.”

Lucius was now regarding her with mocking incredulity. “And you really haven’t guessed what it is?” His eyes glittered. “I would have thought you, Bellatrix, with your eagerness about the Dark Arts—” he glanced towards her book, sitting open on her lap—“would have been all over this.”

Bellatrix hated that. She hated when other people acted like they knew things she didn’t, especially when they actually did know something she didn’t.

“Spit it out, Malfoy.”

“Here.” He drew forth a stack of bound paper from his bag and dropped it on the table in front of them. “What do you think?”

Bellatrix stared at the Daily Prophet before her, disappointment sinking in. Had Lestrange tricked her? Was a flimsy _newspaper_ article the thing they had acted so suspiciously about?

“You should read it too,” Lucius encouraged Narcissa, who rose shyly from her seat and hovered over Bellatrix’s shoulder to get a better look.

Bellatrix had opened her mouth to ridicule Lucius when she caught sight of the headline: **Mysterious Radical Purity Group Gains Attention.**

Bellatrix closed her mouth. Trying to look nonchalant, she bent to scan the page.

_Suspicions and fear in wake of recent disappearances of Muggle-born witches and wizards…Head of Magical Law Enforcement promises full investigation…“Now, more than ever, we must prize the traditional values long upheld by Wizarding families, and the safety of protecting our magic and lifestyles from outsiders,” said Abraxus Malfoy, yesterday, discussing his recent donation towards The Society for Protection of Wizarding Blood… rumors of a gathering, mysterious group, growing in attention…potential use of Dark Arts—_

Bellatrix’s stomach gave a swoop—

… _faction allegedly known as_ Death Eaters, _rumored to be led by mysterious presence known as_ Lord Voldemort, _known to followers as_ “The Dark Lord” _…whether façade, collective persona, or man, remains to be seen…whether terrorist group, or the structure our crumbling society needs, or the answer to the current fearful and uncertain times, it remains to be seen. For more on the list of missing persons so far, born of Muggle ancestry, continue to page six._

Bellatrix finished reading before her sister and looked up at Lucius.

“What is this supposed to be?” she asked. “I’ve heard of it, as you know.”

Though she had never before seen any information so explicit. Names like “Death Eaters” were always spoken of in whispers, but often excited whispers, and in their circle, sometimes quietly approving whispers, though once or twice verging on fearful. No one _knew_ the links between the group and the disappearances, of course; some even thought the group would stop the disappearances, but there were enough rumors that Bellatrix knew why cowardly wizards like her uncle denounced the group and others didn’t dare to speak their support at any volume louder than a whisper. Pure-blood wizards were being discredited and punished for voicing, out of closed doors, anything less than glowing praise for the increasing number of Muggle-borns complaining about their status in society.

But Bellatrix was not a cowardly wizard. She reclined in her chair and stared up at Lucius and Narcissa.

“I think they might have the right idea,” she said, though her voice lowered slightly in spite of herself. It felt thrilling, daring, to say out-loud the thing she had begun to muse to herself, though she had to admit she was glad Andromeda was not here; her sister, she knew, disapproved. “He might be on to something, this…Lord.”

But Bellatrix couldn’t help her lip curling as she spoke: “Lord” was not a wizarding title. Indeed, from the little she knew about such things, she had heard it was a facet of _Muggle_ society.

The other name, though, the one she had not spoken…Voldemort. There was something to that, something exciting…something dangerous, perhaps. Though she would not give Lucius the satisfaction of knowing she was interested, when her so clearly expected her to be impressed on his account.

“Did you just show us this to prove Daddy’s getting his lime-light?” she asked him with a smirk.

She had expected Lucius to rise to her insult with a retort, but he merely looked disbelieving at her. Before he could respond, Cissy murmured, “That’s odd.”

She had just finished reading, having read more carefully than Bellatrix and having looked at the follow-up profile of the disappearances on page six.

She looked up, puzzling. “Who wrote this article?”

Bellatrix pointed. “It says right here, Antonin Dolohov.”

It was a familiar name; Bellatrix recalled meeting him once or twice at dinner parties.

“No, Bella, I mean, what is Dolohov’s connection to this group? To the Death Eaters?”

Lucius smiled proudly at Narcissa, who offered him a smile back. “See, Bellatrix? Your sister has a handle on it.”

“What then?” Bellatrix asked. Her mind began to tumble ahead of her, deconstructing the puzzle. Understanding dawned.

“Dolohov’s in the group,” she said. It was not a question.

Lucius didn’t answer her directly, but he crouched over the table and lowered his voice. “There are others.”

Bellatrix looked behind her—the common room was the deserted. Malfoy’s hushed voice piqued her interest, but it was Narcissa who spoke.

“Who else?” her sister asked quietly, bending closer to Malfoy.

“For one,” Lucius continued, keeping his voice suspenseful, “your uncle, Roderick Rosier.”

Narcissa gave a sharp intake of breath.

Bellatrix didn’t, though she felt her pulse quicken. She had always been fascinated with Uncle Roderick, their mother’s brother, with his grim aspect and dry humor and position at the Ministry. While Orion trembled behind his enchantments and allowed scum to threaten his nieces unpunished, Uncle Roderick was one of these—these _fighters_ , perhaps taking a stand.

Bellatrix was surprised at the insistence with which she asked Malfoy, “Does Evan know?”

“No, and it would be unwise to enlighten him.”

Bellatrix didn’t ask how he had come by this information but spit out the next question consuming her. “Who else is in the group, then?”

Lucius hesitated. “I can’t say.”

Bellatrix was about to disparage him for overstating his knowledge in typical fashion—then it occurred to her. She knew of another man who had once been outspokenly anti-Muggle, who had grown more publicly quiet as of late, who had a son who had just recently done something suspicious…

“Silenus Lestrange,” she cried, with growing excitement. “Rodolphus’s father.”

 She wasn’t asking, but Lucius gave her the faintest twitch of his head—affirmation. His eyes swiveled from one end of the common room to the other, as if he feared he was being watched.

“And,” Malfoy said, very softy, but like he had been bursting to say this since he had started speaking, “Me, as well.”

Bellatrix and Narcissa stared at him. Narcissa looked nervous but almost reverent.

Bellatrix, on the other hand, burst into dismissive laughter. “You think this—what is it— ‘collective persona’ _Lord_ let’s fifth years join-up? You’re sixteen.”

But Malfoy nodded tensely. “Anyone can join, as long as they’re dedicated. As long as they prove themselves. You know Rodolphus Lestrange, don’t you, Bellatrix?” he asked with mock casualness. “He might join his father someday too.”

Bellatrix ignored the jab.

It was all beginning to form a semi-coherent picture in her mind: Both Rodolphus and Malfoy were implicated in this group, somehow, and both seemed incapable of speaking about it directly. Bellatrix wondered why Lucius had then been able to name her uncle Roderick as one of the members, but it wasn’t her most immediate thought. More pressingly, she wondered: Had Rodolphus and Malfoy known how this information would affect her? Had they known how it would make her feel? Malfoy had anticipated her curiosity about the Dark Arts, but the rest—

Even in her recent vein of study, Bellatrix had never read anything that so appealed to her. This group— _the Death Eaters_ —seemed to reflect all her dearest desires. They didn’t wait. They didn’t sit. Masked in secrets and the potency of the Dark Arts, they _made_ change themselves.

Bellatrix hungered for freedom and power akin to theirs. She burned to use her talents, instead of wasting away inside the moldy castle learning about spells they told her she could not use. She was the best duelist in Hogwarts, she was sure of it. In the past week and a half, she had come to know more about the Dark Arts and Unforgivable Curses than anyone else in the school, and she would be damned if she did not do something with her knowledge. Anything else was infuriating. Lucius Malfoy: incompetent, pompous, almost three years her junior, would be allowed to galivant about as part of an exciting, illicit, underground network. And she would be told to keep her damn head down and marry Rodolphus Lestrange. She was done losing out on things to people younger than her. Desire was driving through her blood. She wanted to stand up, she wanted to give chase, she wanted to shriek.

Yet, the uncertainties churned through her mind. Why _had_ Malfoy shown the article to her? Why had Lestrange mentioned it? Bellatrix could have chanced upon the story in the _Prophet_ herself. It would have entertained her, intrigued her even, but she wouldn’t have understood its gravity or its relevance—was that why Malfoy had felt the need to show it to her personally? And why _her_? Rodolphus had baited her with the secret to get her to the party, and Malfoy…was Malfoy merely boasting? Trying to make a good showing of himself for Cissy? It would explain some of the puzzle, but not all of it…There was more, more she didn’t understand.

Bellatrix burned with questions. She wondered which to ask first, but the one that came out of mouth was:

“How do I join?”

Lucius did not seem surprised, though Narcissa gasped.

“Bella!” she whispered. “It’d be so dangerous…”

Lucius clasped Cissy’s shoulder gently. “There now, don’t worry. Not too dangerous. They’re still operating in secret, as you see…not letting people know too much. Though there is some risk,” he said, turning back to regard Bellatrix with a cold stare that was older than his sixteen years.

Bellatrix met his stare haughtily. “I don’t mind risk.”

“No,” said Lucius, “I don’t suppose you do.”

Noise interrupted their discussion: a shuffling of feet and the swelling of voices. A large group of Slytherins, finished with dinner, bustled into the common room.

Lucius stepped away from the sisters; Narcissa began scrawling erratically on her roll of parchment, eyes still wide and fixed on Bellatrix; and Bellatrix remained where she was, unable to control the torrent of emotion she was sure appeared on her face.

Lucius spoke again first, his voice slightly raised above the new din in the common room.

“Would you care to take a turn through the grounds before night?” he asked Narcissa.

Narcissa tore her frightened eyes away from Bellatrix and nodded.

“Very well,” she said, regaining some of her proud composure and reaching for her History of Magic book.

Lucius tucked it pompously into his arms. “Allow me.”

Their insipid pleasantries reminded Bellatrix where she was and to whom she was speaking. Malfoy was again his normal, arrogant self, no longer the dangerous fountain of knowledge he had briefly seemed. His abrupt return to normalcy rendered their previous conversation strangely dream-like in Bellatrix’s mind. But no—it had happened, and it was real, and she was still clutching the newspaper tightly between her hands. She hadn’t remember seizing a hold of it, but she must have, somewhere in her excitement.

“You can keep the paper, Bellatrix,” Lucius called over his shoulder, as he and Narcissa walked away.

She detected a faint smirk on his face, and then the door had shut, and then Bellatrix was alone, with nothing but her writhing thoughts to entertain her.

In the next day, the whispers about _Death Eaters_ increased, or maybe she just began to hear them more.


	7. The Inheritance Party

Narcissa held up one set of dress robes, light purple and delicate, against another, dark green and lacy. “This one or this one?”

Bellatrix hunched on Narcissa’s bed. Her eye wandered from the silver mirror on Narcissa’s nightstand, to the collection of shoes piled under the bed, to the robes in her sister’s hands.

“That one,” she said, indicating the green without looking closely. “Brings out the Slytherin in you.”

“I wear so much green, though.” Narcissa considered it. “Which do you think Lucius will like?”

“ _Don’t_ ask me that. Whichever you like. It’s not up to Lucius how you look.”

Narcissa pursed her lips.  “I do have that blue pair Aunt Walburga gave me for Christmas…I could wear those…”

Bellatrix went back to tracing her fingers up and down Narcissa’s bedspread, deep in thought.

“What are you going to wear?” Narcissa turned from the pile of rejected robes slowly amassing on her dormitory floor, looking eager. “I could help you choose!”

“I have not even thought about it yet.”

She hadn’t: all her thoughts were rotating around her plan for the night. She was going to tease an answer out of Lestrange, her uncle, Lucius—whoever happened to be at the event, and however she had to. If she needed to seduce Rod or hold him at wand-point to discern the truth, she would.

“Wear the black!”  Narcissa was, as ever, immune to Bellatrix’s lack of interest.  “Oh, or the maroon, the ones you wore for the portraits last year. Or you could wear your green, if I wear something different…”

“You pick for me.”

 She twisted her wand to make one of Narcissa’s shoes revolve in mid-air, just to give herself something to do with her hands.

How much did Lestrange know, really? Did he know the extent of his father’s involvement with the Death Eaters? Did he know Malfoy’s? There were in it together somehow…

“So,” Cissy began, now trying out different hair styles in the mirror and examining their effects. “Does this mean you and Rodolphus are back together?”

“No.”

The shoe clattered to the ground as Bellatrix’s concentration broke. A flick of her wand sent the shoe spinning across the room, where it collided with Heloise Avery’s bedpost. “Though Lestrange is alright, you know, if you tell him exactly what to do.”

Narcissa missed the both the sarcastic tone and innuendo of this statement.

“You make a good team,” she offered, smiling at herself in the mirror as she pulled her hair into a gentle knot. “Oh, I like this. That will look best with the green robes, you were right…”

After Narcissa was outfitted to her own satisfaction, she tramped Bellatrix down to the seventh-year dormitory and attempted to do the same for her sister. Narcissa was most pleased with the black dress-robes, although they did not very greatly from Bellatrix’s school robes, save a more elegant cut, lace details, and tighter sleeves. The robes felt pleasurably slick against her skin, refreshing after the enforced blandness of her uniform.

“Leave you hair down,” Cissy encouraged, “I love it like that.”

Once Bellatrix was deemed presentable by Narcissa, they mounted the stairs.

The common room was dim and studious. The green lamps flickered, the fire was dying, and the dozen students occupying the room sat at the tables with books spread before them.

Lestrange and Malfoy stood in contrast to this environment. Lucius reclined on a bench and Rodolphus leaned over a chair, gazing at the stairwell.

Lucius looked even paler than normal above his frilly collar and jeweled sleeves: Always trying to compensate for the recent acquisition their wealth, the Malfoys tended to be unwontedly gaudy in their choice of presentation. There were so many costly details, it took Bellatrix a moment to notice that Malfoy’s robes were emerald; she had to restrain her laugher when she observed how impeccably he and Narcissa matched each other. They could have been twins; she would have to remember that as fodder for teasing Cissy sometime in the future.

Rodolphus, on the other hand, was dressed in burgundy robes of a simpler cut than Malfoy’s, but a richer material. The Lestranges were a proper old family, and for that, they had Bellatrix’s respect. She had to concede Rod looked well, though in an earthy, boyish way. She felt no shame for the fact she had slept with him, but, try as she might, she still could not see herself marrying him, loving him, or doting on him—the thought was so uncomfortable she pushed it away.

“Narcissa,” Lucius said, dropping into a performative bow. Bellatrix hid her snort with difficulty.

He extended his arm, and Narcissa wrapped her own through it, in every way the model of composure, save the dancing of her eyes and the pink of her cheeks. Bellatrix already predicted that Cissy would be insufferable; she wouldn’t stop talking about this for weeks.

Bellatrix noticed that Rodolphus was watching her. With a little quirk of his eyebrow, he offered up his own arm.

“Why don’t we play along,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth, which demonstrated more self-awareness than Bellatrix had thought him capable of.

She knew the rules of the game; they had been hammered into her since her infancy, try though she had to resist them.

She wound her arm through Lestrange’s. “I have to apologize,” she murmured in his ear as they followed Lucius and Narcissa into the dungeon corridor. “I’m afraid I haven’t matched my robes to yours. I must be doing you and your House a great disservice.”

Rodolphus suppressed a smile. “Bellatrix Black, dressed in black,” he muttered absently.

As they promenaded towards Slughorn’s office, Bellatrix couldn’t help but note the difference between their pairs.

Lucius matched his strides to Narcissa’s. More than their matching robes or physical similarities, they mirrored each other, leaning and smiling and strolling as a couple. Narcissa lent Malfoy some of her weight through their connected arms, which he accepted and supported.

 Bellatrix and Lestrange were tethered by the link of the entwined arms, but only tethered. They walked independently despite the connection. He was of her height, though broader, but Bellatrix walked more quickly than he did. She felt him lengthening his strides to walk at a comparable pace, but their feet remained out of sync. She supported her own weight, and he did not ask for it. It felt more as though they had linked arms as part of an infantry line than as a pair at a party.

Bellatrix considered interrogating him here, now, before they had even reached the festivities. But no, she would wait. It would be easier to approach him on his own, separated from Malfoy. She could then deal with Lucius if Rod’s answers were unsatisfactory. And she would like to keep her investigation as secret from Narcissa as she could; no need to spoil the party for his sister. If Cissy had seemed fearful at Bellatrix’s casual inquiry into joining the Death Eaters, she couldn’t anticipate how Narcissa would treat her launching an investigation among known members of the secretive, dangerous group for more information.

They had arrived outside of Slughorn’s office.

Rodolphus disentangled his arm from Bellatrix and rapped twice, curtly, on the door. It was flung open in an instant.

“Mr. Lestrange!” the plump old man cried, waddling up to them. “And Miss Black! A lovely couple, lovely. Come inside, come inside…”

“Thank you, _Sir_.”

Slughorn, missing her scathing tone, bobbed his great head. “Certainly, certainly…Oh, Miss Narcissa and Mr. Malfoy, a handsome pair if I’ve ever seen…”

He continued chattering as they filed inside. The old man worshipped them, she knew. Through a tenuous connection to the pure-blood elite, he hoped to boost to his own lack of status, but Bellatrix had never had patience for his posturing. It was feigned and contrived, and she despised people who pretended at anything, or lacked the passion to at least make their performance convincing.

She glanced around the office. It was large but fussy, in keeping with the tastes of the large and fussy man. At least in the room visible to her, there was little of interest. Her gaze hovered for a moment on the collection of silvery vials in the corner—perhaps they contained things that could be useful to her. But not tonight. She had to get through the party before she could resume her pursuit of the Dark Arts.

Slughorn ushered them toward the fire spitting in the corner. “Into the fire as you please, then,” he chimed.

His plump hands cradled a pot of Floo powder, which he held deferentially towards Rodolphus.

Lestrange pinched the dust first and stepped into the emerald fire. Lucius followed, then Narcissa, who gave Bellatrix’s hand a squeeze before she did.

“Lestrange Manor,” whispered Narcissa, not troubling conceal her excitement from Slughorn or Bellatrix. She was whisked away in the churning of the fire, and her smile and silver hair flashed from sight.

“Miss Black,” Slughorn said, offering Bellatrix the powder.

Her fingers closed on the ashy substance before flinging it into the flames.

Bellatrix stepped into the fireplace, letting the green flames encircle her and lick her flesh. She had the insane wish, for a moment, that it would be a real fire, and it would consume her whole but leave her intact; that she could burn and emerge like a phoenix, cleansed by the heat and scorching pain.

“Lestrange Manor,” she said. Slughorn’s office and rotund frame spun dizzyingly into the distance.

It was not a real fire, and the thought passed, and Bellatrix did not emerge cleansed, but rather shaking the soot out of her hem as she stepped from the spinning grate and into the high-ceilinged ballroom of the Lestrange Manor.

Her first thought was that she had been there before. Almost all the old families had spent time at each other’s manors for various social functions: it was an excellent opportunity to size-up others’ wealth.

She remembered the last time she had been at the Lestranges’ mansion. It had been for the All Hallow’s Eve festival, a day before her eleventh birthday. Still wandless—she would not be permitted to attend Hogwarts until the following autumn—she had coaxed Rodolphus and his younger brother Rabastan into dueling her with sticks in the corner of this very ballroom. She had won, of course.

Little had changed in the grand room: though it was fuller of people now than it had been then, it was still imposing and opulent. The floors were dark granite, tinged with streaks of rust and amethyst. They glinted in the light from the chandeliers which, enchanted, floated high above her head. Paintings of silver ivy and ravens crossed the ceilings: a sprawling variation on the Lestrange crest. Columns braced the room on all sides from windows, which showed the starry face of night, and ancient oil paintings, depicting the Lestrange history. A few elderly wizards strolled the second-floor ledge that wound around the ballroom and peered at the guests down below.

The rest of the attendees were congregated in the center of the room in a churning, dazzling knot. Bellatrix recognized all of them: pure-bloods did not associate with those they didn’t know. Some of their names drifted from her memory, but the faces were all familiar. As Bellatrix and her cohort had obtained special permission to leave the castle, there was no one else her age in sight, though she noticed a few recent graduates. Rodolphus’s brother, Rabastan, was nowhere to be seen and had not come with them. Bellatrix wondered if his absence was due to his bitterness at being a second son or merely his abysmal grades.

She squinted but could not find Silenius Lestrange or Uncle Roderick in the crowd. She had rather hoped to size them up with the new respect she felt for their secret alliance, but she reminded herself that she still had Lucius and Rodolphus to interrogate.

There was no reason to resist any longer. Bellatrix approached the throng.

It was a sea of faces: Madam Avery, thin cheeks spotted with rouge, sipping deeply from a goblet; Yaxley Sr., talking loudly and boisterously about the new addition he planned to add to their country home; old Cantankerous Nott, hacking into a handkerchief; reedy Travers, leering far too obviously at Madam Crabbe’s décolletage; Madam Lestrange herself, cool eyes and painted red lips and throat dripping diamonds as she oversaw the scene. Her own aunt and uncle were in attendance, though Bellatrix whipped away at the sight of them. She would not speak to them, though they had at least left the wretched Sirius and frail Regulus behind.

She began to feel herself enclosed at once. The faces circled her. They preened. Some of them spoke. She laughed merrily and curtseyed and felt herself inspected and scrutinized and judged. It was like playing a game. She won when she was more charming than the others, when her witty remarks landed, when she could insert seemingly innocent comments that rang with double-meaning. The game held some enjoyment, but she still threatened to become overwhelmed by the sheer mindlessness of their chatter. Nearly of all the people seemed wrapped in a grand façade.

Bellatrix had lost Rod at once but descried a pair of twin blonde heads moving amid the sea. Narcissa and Lucius made a successful showing of themselves; Bellatrix watched as several adults doted on them as a pair. Bellatrix had never managed to make herself so universally appealing.

In her current conversation, she was not particularly compelled to give any social niceties. She was, however, impressed that Madam Avery was still steady on her feet after her fifth consecutive glass of wine.

The woman regarded Bellatrix with a bleary eye.

“My daughter Heloise is three years younger than you, in your sister’s year,” she slurred. “And my son is a year or two older than you. He always said—lovely things.”

Bellatrix nodded, the bare minimum of a polite response. She didn’t care what Avery thought of her but wondered idly what he had been able to repeat to his mother that was so lovely. He had been one of her fifth-year flings, and precious little that they had done together could be considered lovely.

“I have another son, too.” Madam Avery’s voice was shrill above the crowd. “Little Gareth. He’s your cousin Sirius’s age.”

Bellatrix’s jaw tightened at the mention of her cousin, but Madam Avery continued, oblivious,

“I always thought that Sirius was a strange one.” Some of her wine slopped over its glass and puddled on the floor. Madam Avery didn’t seem to notice. “I was surprised to hear that—”

“Evening,” a familiar voice interrupted by Bellatrix’s elbow.

Stirred by Rodolphus’s appearance, Madam Avery seemed to register the mess she had made and her dripping goblet. She snapped for a house-elf, giving Bellatrix a brief respite from the prattle.

“Drinks,” Rodolphus muttered in Bellatrix’s ear, “Quick. While her back is turned.”

Bellatrix felt her jaw unclench as she accompanied him towards a table coruscant with glasses, bottles, and crystal bowls. Rodolphus poured two glasses of dark red wine.

“Elf-made, I hope,” he said, pressing one into her hand.

She sipped. It was, and good.

“Grab the whole bottle,” she suggested, flashing Rodolphus a wicked smile. “Smuggle it out and save some for school.”

“Don’t think there’s room for this bottle in your robes, if that’s how you were planning to get it out…” He glanced at her up and down. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen robes so tight.”

Bellatrix took another sip of wine.

“Maybe you could stick it down your pants,” she countered impishly. “The area could use extra padding.”

“I hate you, Bellatrix,” said Rodolphus, but affection warmed his voice.

She raised her glass in a little mocking toast. “Likewise.”

Now was the perfect time, Bellatrix thought, to get a straight answer from him about the Death Eaters. They were removed from the center circle of the party. He was plying her with wine and companionship. Perhaps he knew nothing at all, but even proof of his ignorance would be reassuring.

Trying to look as enticing as she could, Bellatrix stroked the rim of her wine glass with the tip of her finger.

“Lestrange,” she said.

As if drawn by her voice, Rod’s body leaned towards her unconsciously. Hs hips drifted forward. Bellatrix knew enough of body language to read it as a positive sign: he was like clay in her hand.

She softened him with a smile. “I did manage to talk to Lucius yesterday, and I found myself fascinated by—”

“There you are, Rodolphus.”

Madam Lestrange had swept to where they stood by the table, cutting cleanly through Bellatrix’s attempt.

“And Miss Black, a great pleasure. We are delighted by your presence here tonight.”

She allowed Bellatrix an elegant curtsy which Bellatrix copied—though internally she gnashed her teeth. She had been so close.

“Rodolphus,” said Madam Lestrange. “Your cousins have just arrived. Come and greet them.”

She extended a braceleted arm. Silver flashed on her wrist.

Lestrange glanced from Bellatrix to his mother.

“Excuse me,” he mumbled to Bellatrix. He ducked his head in a half-hearted bow and then followed his mother’s arm. His burgundy silhouette disappeared again into the crowd.

Watching her source of information slip away, Bellatrix sloshed more wine into her glass. After it was filled to the brim, she drained it, leaving nothing but purple dregs behind. The wine was thick and bitter on her tongue. Not troubling to look for a better place to put it, she deposited the empty glass back on the refreshments table.

Bellatrix had always prided herself on a high resistance to drink, but she could feel the rapidity with which she had consumed the strong wine colouring her vision, slightly: her head felt heavier as she swung it from side to side, and the ballroom looked strangely unreal.

From her position on the fringes, it was like a tableau or some cloying painting, all the robes sparkling and the people’s mouths opening and closing like fish.

Abruptly, Bellatrix strolled away from the drinks table. She did not know what her plan was or where she was headed, but she didn’t particularly want to insert herself into the throng again. She would regroup before resuming her quest for information.

Spurred by a flicker of recklessness, Bellatrix decided she would amuse herself by looking around the Lestrange Manor while everyone was occupied in the ballroom. There were memories here, fond ones, from childhood. And it was always enjoyable to explore abandoned places; it made her feel as though she had the building to herself for a while.

No one noticed as she ducked behind the columns. A dingy portrait of an old man—who looked strikingly like Rodolphus—said something that sounded scathing, but Bellatrix continued along the windows until she found a small, wooden door and pushed it open.

The hallway behind it was blessedly quiet and cool. Bellatrix exhaled. The sounds of the party were muffled behind the door, but her ears still rung with echo of the voices.

She ambled up the hallway. Her presence felt loud in the silence of the deserted rooms and corridors. Each of her breaths sounded magnified, like she was passing through a dream. She wondered if she could remember running along here as a child or if she merely imagined it. 

A turn brought her to the grand staircase. This landmark was familiar to her. She had watched couples be presented on it when she was young. The memory of warm bodies, toasting, and laughter contrasted with the still, empty expanse before her. Her shoes clicked on the marble as she climbed, and her black robes dragged behind her on the white steps. She looked up—the portrait of an imposing man, some Lestrange ancestor or another, stared back, rendered on a massive canvas in a gilt frame. In a fit of pettiness, Bellatrix stuck her tongue out at him, though the painting did not even notice her. She wondered where the women’s portraits were hidden.

The hall she took after the staircase was narrower, though the ceilings were still impressively high. Each slice of wall was like a tiered cake, topped with crown molding and dressed in engravings. She peaked into a room behind swinging doors—a dark study, hung with a map of England. She considered lingering and snooping, but no, she was too restless to stay.

Bellatrix continued down the hall, ducking around corners and padding over the long rug that ran through the middle of the floor.

She neared the edge of this passage. Doors lined one side—her curiosity begged her to fling open all of them, but she resisted the impulse. Opposite the doors, a high window reached from floor to ceiling at the very end of the hall. The hangings were drawn open, so she could see the sky and the land behind the panes of glass. She drew towards it.

Bellatrix peered out the window. Below, the lawn stretched until it melded into forest. She strained to see the stars, but due to a nearby cluster of candles, her own wobbly reflection blocked her view—

Bellatrix gasped.

Her reflection was not the only one in the window 


	8. An Unexpected Guest

Wand poised to attack, Bellatrix spun to face the foe.

And then, she stiffened, immobile in her stance.

Her wand pointed at someone she did not recognize. There was no one at this party that Bellatrix did not recognize.

Yet, she had never seen this man before. She was sure she had not, because she would have been incapable of forgetting his face.

Cast in the candle-light, it looked like a face that could have been sculpted from marble. Striking, almost other-worldly, his visage was comprised of aristocratic angles: high, glass-cut cheekbones and snow-white skin, framed by black hair. Bellatrix did not often notice people’s eyes, but she noticed his. They were dark. They slid past her outstretched wand, to rest fully on her. Bellatrix could not look away.

“Quick reflexes,” the man said lightly. Bellatrix twitched. She had expected a low, commanding voice, but his twisted with a soft sibilance.

She eyed the stranger down the length of her motionless arm.

She sized him up as a threat: he was taller than her by far, in some ways an advantage, though that meant there were more places for her curses to land, but she could tell he was lean beneath his tailored dress robes; not the best target after all…

Most unnerving, his manner was easy. The stranger did not seem at all troubled to stand undefended before her wand, poised at his chest. Bellatrix would have been a fool not to sense the thrill of danger he bespoke, and yet, he made no move to defend himself…

She lowered her wand an inch.

“Do not drop your wand, girl,” the man chided, still in that same soft voice. “What if I were to attack you? Lowering your weapon would be a foolish mistake.”

Bellatrix twitched it back towards his chest. “Are you to attack me?”

 “You are bold.” He spoke as if to himself, though his voice was far from reproving: it sounded pleased.

Bellatrix burned to know who the stranger was but asking “ _who are you_ ” would be laughable, callow.

“You could hardly duel me without your wand," she tested.

“There is much you don’t know. But, you are in luck. I do have my wand.”

It sounded like a challenge.

The adrenaline coursed—she readied her wand, though she stayed frozen, all her muscles taut. “I will fight you.”

“Will you?” the man asked, as if amused. His eyes roved over her wand, her hands, her chest, her throat. “How very interesting,” he murmured. “Yes, I almost believe you would.”

Bellatrix did not move.

The man’s mouth relaxed into a smile: charming, self-assured, _disarming_. Something in Bellatrix’s stomach fluttered against her will.

“I will not attack you,” he said quietly. “It not often one gets to meet such fascinating witches in the hallways at parties, and I would hate to waste the opportunity dueling."

Bellatrix lowered wand. Instead of pocketing it, she kept it clutched at her side as a precaution.

The man still teased her with his arrogant smile. “You have a question,” he said.

In fact, Bellatrix had several. She chose one that sounded the least naïve. “How can I be sure you will not curse me?”

The stranger chuckled. “We must trust each other. We have both crept away from the party, it seems. Did you grow weary of the _artifice_ of it all?”

Bellatrix found herself nodding: The word was so specific, it seemed to have been snatched from her own head.

Despite the danger of their encounter, or perhaps it was _because_ of the danger of their encounter, she could not help but notice that she found the stranger alluring. Bellatrix had often wondered if there was something lacking in her self-preservation instinct—she had always been drawn, calamitously so, to pain, to danger, to her own demise.

Though he was not any family patriarch she recognized, his appearance assured her of his pure breeding. Bellatrix began to mirror his comportment, allowing herself to slide into the role of proud, pure-blood princess. She knew well how to charm schoolboys and scions, but not men with this stranger’s poise. Though his features were strangely ageless—he could have been 25, he could have been 40—she was unsure if he was young enough to fall for the tactics she used on wizards her own age.

In any case, she was beginning to feel less and less inclined to go back to the party.

“I did creep away,” Bellatrix told the man, working a well-practiced smirk onto her face, “but I doubt the party has noticed or missed me.”

The man leaned against the opposite wall. His body moved with a fluid grace.

“I have arrived late it seems,” he said. “And I came in through a back entrance, not to attract overmuch attention.”

She wondered who this man was that he would attract overmuch attention.

And then, she knew, and she wondered if she had known it all along.      

Her smirk faltered. Had she made a fool of herself? The danger was likely greater than she had even imagined—but strangely, she did not feel afraid.

“You have another question,” he observed.

Bellatrix glanced down the hallway. It was still deserted. “Do you plan on going to the ballroom?”

“That is not the question you wish to ask,” he scolded, “is it?”

Bellatrix did not reply. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

“Then I will ask a question of my own: What is your name?”

She cocked her head. His stare was too intense to be innocent—she had read about Legilimency and recognized the signs. Bellatrix began to think he played an elaborate game with her, and she had never met a game she didn’t want to win, impudence be damned.

“You know that already,” she challenged. “Do you not?”

He regarded her from his recline on the wall, the candlelight conjuring shadows across his face.

“Very good, Miss Black. Though I suppose you prefer Bellatrix.” His mouth seemed to trace the word, and she saw, with a rush, the smile twist around it. “…or _Bella_.”

Her heart lurched. He used her private name; her family name; the name only people she loved could use.

Observing her reaction, his lips twitched, threatening laughter. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” And to her own surprise, nothing was.

“It is customary, I think,” he continued, “to ask the other’s name after one has given their own.”

“But I know your name.” Bellatrix could not help the triumph in her voice as she waited for sign of confirmation. “I only wonder what I should call you.”

Something settled in his face. Bellatrix saw a flicker of cold intensity and detachment, and she wondered if she had glimpsed the Dark wizard behind the gallant stranger. In that moment, she could indeed see him as the leader of a rebellion.

“Very, very good,” Lord Voldemort whispered. “I am called many things. Friends of the movement have taken to calling me the Dark Lord. What will you call me, Bellatrix?”

She could see her own reflection in the Dark Lord’s red-tinged, glinting eyes.

The way he looked at her…it stole her breath and filled her lungs with icy water. She wondered if she should be afraid but—strangely, strangely—she _liked_ it. His gaze pierced her, penetrated her—

It was exhilarating. She realized what he was doing. No desire to resist, she led him. She invited him into the swirling nebula of her thoughts.

Memories rose before her.

_Bellatrix was 11, and she was leading Macnair, Nott, and Lestrange into the Forbidden Forest on a dare—Macnair was crying out that he feared werewolves, and she was laughing in his face…_

_Bellatrix had been tasked with watching 2-year-old Sirius, and she was enchanting a spider to dangle close to his head, and Aunt Walburga slapped her when she saw…_

_Bellatrix was listening to their private healer diagnose her father, and the healer reported that pure-bloods have a higher likelihood of contracting the Pox—most pure-blood healers began to believe the disease was spread from Muggle-borns, he said…_

_Bellatrix was crying in her room as glass shattered around her, because she was nothing, nothing, nothing—_

She stirred—she pulled to escape the memory. Resistance blocked her, and then she felt him relinquish his hold. She slipped.

Bellatrix remembered who she was, holding her wand at her side and standing against a window in an empty wing of the Lestrange Manor, face to face with the leader of the pure-blood resistance.

He was looking at her, mild curiosity colouring his shadow-cast face.

“Tell me, Bellatrix, do you know Occlumency?”

“I know it,” she said, somewhat stiffly. “But not how.”

 “Naturally high barriers then—reluctant, are we Bellatrix? I could have pushed, of course, but I believe I saw enough.”

Lord Voldemort approached her. The shadows of the hall seemed to follow him, to cling to him, even as he moved into the full candlelight. He stood close—she sensed the coldness, the knowledge, the power radiating off him, rendering everything else in the vicinity mundane.

His voice sunk into a velvet whisper.

“It seems they taught you to be a warrior and then kept you in a cage. How… _cruel_. And you have sought to teach yourself. You have many skills, but it hasn’t been enough, has it? You fear nothing will ever be enough for you. There is a darkness inside you, and you crave it. You want more…you are always wanting more. You have a great hunger, Bellatrix.”

Bellatrix breathed. She forgot the shame of her weakest memory. She forgot all reluctance, all wariness, all self-consciousness.

For he knew her. And when he said _Bellatrix_ , it sounded like _warrior_.

What could she say to capture the ecstatic torrent of feeling churning inside of her? Before she could determine, he had retreated, distancing himself again.

“I fear I have overstepped myself,” he murmured. “Forgive me. I believe there is a party I have detained you from, and I wouldn’t wish your presence to be missed.”

Bellatrix blinked; she had almost forgotten. She heard the dismissal in his voice.

“I daresay I will be there soon,” he said as she turned to back up the hall.

Bellatrix resisted the temptation to glance behind her as she walked, but after she had rounded a corner and was convinced of her privacy, she felt the wild grin spreading across her face.

Had she truly tried to duel _him_ , the one they called the Dark Lord? She could have never anticipated her investigation into the Death Eaters would reap such fruitful results.

A terrifying, electrifying idea occurred to her—she could ask him if she could join. She could approach him, the leader himself, and see what he said.

The thrill of the possibility carried her all the way back to the ballroom.

She heard strings and music as she approached. When she pushed open the wooden door, a flurry of couples dancing beneath the spangled, floating chandeliers greeted her.

Across the ring of spinning dancers, Rodolphus spotted her as she emerged from behind the columns.

“There you are,” he observed as he neared. “You’ve been gone.”

“I have,” Bellatrix said, fighting down the vestiges of the smile still shining on her face.

He looked utterly clueless. “Where?”

Bellatrix shook her head.

“What has happened?” asked Rodolphus through narrowed eyes. “You look strange.”

Bellatrix imagined she did: flushed skin, bouncing with anticipation, beaming, glancing towards the door behind her, wondering if a tall, pale silhouette would appear through it momentarily.

She did not want to tell Lestrange of the conversation she had just had. Her desire to impress was warring with a new desire: to hold everything into her chest, a desperate, solitary secret.

“Have you yet danced?” she asked him.

“I haven’t.”

“Unpopular, are we?” she laughed, looking once more over her shoulder at the door. It remained closed.

Lestrange turned his face away from her, as if studying the drinks table. “I was waiting for you.”

He didn’t say it to taunt or flirt—a rarity—and Bellatrix was unsure how to respond.

“Well,” she rallied herself to tease, “that’s what you get for not bringing Greengrass.” She tried to step into his line of vision; his focus remained directed away from her.

Waiting for Lestrange to answer, Bellatrix noticed something she had not since returning. The dancing was not the only change to the ballroom. More guests had arrived, it seemed, among them Silenius Lestrange and Uncle Roderick—she wondered if they knew their master was here.

“More wine then.” Without excusing himself, Rodolphus strolled away to the drinks table.

Bellatrix looked after him—and then her attention was shattered.

“It seems they began dancing in your absence,” said a sinuous voice against her ear.

Bellatrix did not need to turn. She tried in vain to banish all the intrusive thoughts, for fear he might see the jumble flooding her mind.

The Dark Lord stood beside her.

“Welcome to the party,” she said. And then, softly, she added, “my Lord.”

A look flitted across his aristocratic face at the words—was it pleasure?

Bellatrix surprised herself; she had always resented calling her uncle and professors “sir.” She was even more surprised at how natural, even powerful, the words made her feel. It was inclusion. It was the intimation of a relationship: for him to be her lord, she had to be something to him as well.

 “I fear I rarely dance,” he murmured, “though everyone expects one to partake, and it is always advantageous to assure potential allies one is _human._ ” His voice teased over the word. “Do you dance, Bellatrix? You risk looking highly conspicuous, standing when everyone around is not.”

Bellatrix kept her eye trained on everything but him. “I dance selectively, and only when asked very well.” The impudent words tumbled from her mouth; she cringed remembering the glasses of strong wine she had drunk.

“Ah,” he said. “Do you dance when instructed?”

 “Never,” she breathed.

He took a step closer to her. Her resistance buckled; she peered up at the man by her side. Something in her chest seemed to freeze as she did.

“Then it seems I must ask you and do it _very_ well.” Smoothly, his hands enclosed one of hers. His touch was like ice: hard, cold, and strangely clinical, but Bellatrix felt her flesh burn beneath his fingers. He raised her left hand to his mouth, the model of pure-blood manners, and she felt the slightest graze of his lips like a shock.

“Will you dance with me?” he asked, and then, in her ear, breathed, “ _Bella_?”

She met his request as coolly as she was able. “I will.”

She was dimly aware that everyone was clapping all around: a song had just ended, couples were moving and breaking and forming, and Lord Voldemort was leading her by the hand to a spot on the floor.

A song began, led by a quavering cello, slow and tenuous and minor key.

One of his white, long-fingered hands brushed her waist and held her there. He held her at distance, chaste, formal, almost stiff, but the feeling of his cold skin on her hand and his piercing gaze was enough to keep her aware of his proximity.

He led. Bellatrix had never found herself so willing to follow.

“You will accept my apologies for startling you in the hallway,” Lord Voldemort spoke. “I hope you were not frightened.”

“I am not frightened easily,” said Bellatrix.

He favored her with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “No, I expect not.”

She noticed, on the fringes of her vision, that they were being watched. Others seemed to see the Dark Lord, and whether or not they identified him as such, they took in his presence—and perhaps noted his partner. Bellatrix was rather glad that she was not one to blush.

“I would expect you are still in school.” He turned her before resuming his hold. “How did a witch such as you come to attend this event?”

She regarded him with a slight smirk. “Some professors are very persuadable. If you happen to ask in the right way.”

He mirrored her smirk. “Indeed.”

Bellatrix had the insane wish that he would grab her more tightly, but his touch remained maddeningly light, almost, she feared, indifferent. The thought entered her mind before she could subdue it, and she wondered if she saw some awareness cross his face.

“Tell me your age.” It was a command.

She jutted out her chin “Almost 19.” It was a lie: she would not have her birthday for more than half a year. But she would not be taken for a child.

“You are young,” he murmured to her, “but no child.”

Bellatrix struggled to keep her voice light as she asked, “And how did a wizard such as _you_ come to attend this event? If I might ask.”

“ _If I might ask._ It seems, you already have asked.” His hand twisted, and she spun before coming back to face him. “I suspect you are not in the habit of asking permission, Miss Black.”

“With what I hear of— _recent activities_ —” she ventured, maintaining her light tone, “I cannot help but wonder if wizards such as you do not have ample time for attending inheritance parties.”

“Rarely do young witches wish to discuss politics.”

Bellatrix wondered if she had overstepped, even with her veiled inquiry, but she could not let a comment like _that_ stand.

She raised her nose in the air. “You should now know that I am not like other young witches.”

 “No. You are not.” His dark eyes glittered. “It so happens that I do not mind discussing politics with you, Miss Black. Your interest is flattering. I have indeed been busy, as of late, fashioning an—ah— _appeal_ to the Ministry. But I would not dare to miss an event where so many of my friends and so many young, noble wizards and witches are present.”

 _He said, “and witches,”_ Bellatrix thought feverishly. _He does not disregard witches_

Lord Voldemort’s voice traced the words, “And what do _you_ think of my “recent activities,” as you called them, Miss Black?”

The violin hit a faint, high note, and the music began to diminuendo—

The desire pierced her, with urgency, with intensity, and Bellatrix wondered if she dared to ask him, there, then, on the dance floor, how she might become a Death Eater. She searched for an invitation in his dark, red-tinged eyes, but found none, and the other people around them were far too close—

“I long for the day when wizarding blood is valued once more,” she breathed. “You have my unending support.”

“And I am glad to have your support, Miss Black. Yours, in particular.”

And just like that, the dance had ended. The intimate moment was disrupted by a smattering of applause. Lord Voldemort extracted himself at once.

“You dance well,” he said, and there was something insidiously teasing about the way he said it.

He did not bow but inclined his head the barest fraction of an inch.

Bellatrix felt the inexplicable urge to crumple at his feet. As a Black, she had never had to truly bow and doubted her knowledge of its mechanics, but she wanted to give a gesture that wasn’t a gentle, folding curtsy—she wanted the archaic battle contract of the bow. She wanted to show him respect and also a promise: _I will fight for you._ So, as if he was her dueling opponent, she bent at the waist, but lower than she normally would have, her hair sweeping over her face.

Facing the floor, she murmured, “My Lord,” but quietly enough that only he would hear: her words were only for him.

“We will meet again, Bellatrix,” he said as she returned upright.

Before she could answer, he had strode away into the crowd.


	9. Of Ladies and Lords

Bellatrix stood alone in the middle of the ballroom.

She felt dazed. The party seemed less real than ever, but her senses all were keyed to alertness.

As she disentangled herself from the cluster of couples beginning the next dance, Bellatrix realized she had drifted close to her aunt and uncle. About to whip away, her gaze lingered on them for a moment. Walburga was looking towards Lord Voldemort, where he stood speaking to Silenius across the room. She looked curious, almost respectful. Orion, by contrast, wore an expression of deep suspicion. He looked towards the tall figure of Lord Voldemort, and then his eyes found Bellatrix. Watching the thoughts flicker across his face, she did not need Legilimency to comprehend.

Bellatrix did not blink as she met Orion’s eyes. She looked at him unapologetically, defiantly, until he was forced to look away.

Her satisfaction was interrupted by a swarm of familiar people.

“Bella!” Narcissa was saying, clasping Bellatrix’s hands and redirecting her focus. “Isn’t this the most wonderful party? I’ve barely seen you!”

At her side, Lucius moistened his lips. His eyes flicked back and forth—Bellatrix thought she knew to what, or who, he was looking. Rodolphus, standing behind her sister, seemed similarly wary.

“Yes,” she said to Cissy, “a wonderful party.”

The four of them walked away from the dancers, who now galloped in a quick waltz, past the enchanted instruments playing themselves without musicians, and towards the solace of the drinks table.

When they were distanced from the center, Cissy bent in close.

“Bellatrix,” she whispered, sharp grey eyes peering at her sister, “who was that man? The one you danced with?

Bellatrix tried to think of an answer. Rodolphus was quicker.

“I didn’t know he would be here,” he muttered to no one in particular. “I didn’t. My dad must of—”

His hands clenched and unclenched at his side, and there was something almost guilty about the way he looked at Bellatrix.

“Or he needed to make a public appearance,” said Lucius, trying to appear composed as his hand shook, spooning himself a goblet of punch. “I imagine it’s important for the leader of the pure-blood resistance to interact with the people he fights for, to forge alliances and observe social decorum. At least until the movement becomes public.”

His words clarified something for Bellatrix: Silenius Lestrange, Roderick Rosier, Antonin Dolohov, Rumford Mulciber, and the others handful of late-comers she noticed had not arrived en masse randomly. And the Dark Lord had not simply appeared in that hallway. They must have been meeting, in another corner of the estate, perhaps behind one of the very doors of that hallway she had roamed. Bellatrix wondered what would have happened if she had given into her impulse and flung the doors open—would she have appeared in the midst of a Death Eater gathering?

Narcissa had realized something as well.

“So that’s— _Him_?” she asked, leaning in. “That’s _Lord_ —”

“Don’t say his name,” said Rodolphus through gritted teeth.

“You never say his name.” Lucius twitched Narcissa a wan smile. “If one refers to him, one says The Dark Lord.”

Bellatrix studied her companions, clutching glasses with strained hands. Narcissa’s eyes had grown round.

“And Bellatrix danced with him?”

“So it would seem,” said Malfoy.

Bellatrix tossed her hair. “It is proper to dance when asked.”

But she could feel the excitement leaping through her chest like a sparking fire: they were impressed by her, in awe of her, even, perplexed by the attention she had received. She was as perplexed as them, but it didn’t stop the glee. If they knew she had spoken to him privately as well—but no, her interaction in the hallway was still one she wanted to keep to herself.

Rodolphus shifted his weight from foot to foot. “And did he tell you at all about—”

“Not particularly,” said Bellatrix defensively, anticipating that the end of his sentence would be the Death Eaters. “Though he alluded to the movement.”

“It seems rather dangerous for him to come here, does it not?” Narcissa’s fingers tugged at one of her pearl earrings. “If—the things I read in the Prophet are true, and are his doing, are there not Aurors after him?”

“Everything is too quiet for Aurors to be involved,” countered Malfoy. “There is no proof of any illegality, and they have nothing but a name. And he’s been operating in circles like this, letting his word spread through gossip—it isn’t as if he’s been speaking on a soap-box in Diagon Alley himself.”

“May change soon,” said Rodolphus in a husky whisper. “Things may not stay underground.”

Bellatrix whet her lips. They had both as good as confirmed their involvement, answering at least one of her questions. Lord Voldemort had answered more, though he had raised as many in their wake.

“Lestrange,” said Bellatrix in an urgent undertone, “Malfoy—why did you show me that article? What is all of this about?”

Lestrange clasped his arms. “Don’t ask that,” he said.

Bellatrix glared between them, searching for a hint, for a sign of weakness. “What, then?”

“Dammit, Bellatrix, I thought you might be interested, and I knew Malfoy had been waving that article around.”

Lucius looked cold. “That’s all there is,” he said, but she heard the lie dripping off his voice.

She wanted to shriek at them.

Narcissa still looked troubled. A strand of light hair that had come unpinned swished in front of her face.

“Is it a risk for—for the Dark Lord to be here, when certain wizards disagree with him?”

Lestrange and Malfoy began to answer, but Bellatrix couldn’t focus on Narcissa’s concern or the boys’ replies. She was too irritated at them to listen, and besides, her eyes were drawn towards Lord Voldemort. Wherever he stood in the room, the crowd seemed to dim around him, as if he absorbed their light. She prayed he would catch her eye again even as she feared it.

 _We will meet again Bellatrix_ , he had said.

She shivered.

He seemed to have the same effect on many. Bellatrix felt a pang of pride as she observed the charisma with which he carried himself: the entire room seemed entranced. He fought for magic, he fought for tradition, he fought. How could anyone disagree with him?

After a moment more at the drinks table, the conversation began to falter. Bellatrix, feeling drunk on atmosphere, had had her fill of wine for the evening. Narcissa and Lucius drifted away.

Bellatrix danced with Rodolphus. His hands felt warm and heavy as they groped her waist. Had his hands always been so warm? Desiring to stay in view of where her Lord was bent in discussion in the corner of the ballroom, Bellatrix deigned to dance twice with Lucius as well—though, convinced he would tell her nothing more of interest, they spent the encounters trading insults. The party began to grow smaller and sleepier around them.

After another dance with Rodolphus, Bellatrix detected a stirring in the corner. A few men were Disapparating, some saying parting words to those around before they left, some merely winking out of sight. She saw a flash of his white face, and then Lord Voldemort was gone as well.

The room felt warmer, smaller, and duller in his absence.

Bellatrix cast around but found nothing to hold her gaze. Her Uncle Rosier had left too, before she could so much as speak to him.

“What’s wrong?” asked Rodolphus, catching sight of her expression.

“Nothing,” she said. “I am tired.”

Her opportunities had slipped away. She blamed the expectations of decorum—they had quashed her quest for information, rendering her powerless to demand things outright in view of everyone. But she also blamed herself. The Dark Lord had been deep in conversation after their dance, but she could have mustered the courage to approach him and pledge her allegiance. She could have done so in the hallway, when they were entirely alone.

Yet she had not. Perhaps she was more reticent—maybe even frightened—than she wanted to admit. It disgusted her, disappointed her. Her hands itched for her wand, as if magic might release the pent-up heat in her hands, her stomach, her chest.

“It is late,” said Rodolphus. “Shall we go back to the castle?”

“You cannot very well abandon your own inheritance party before your guests,” said Bellatrix sourly, with a nod to the pairs still mingling and dancing.

Rodolphus angled his jaw. “It’s my party so I can very well do what I want.”

“Will not your mother be mad?” Bellatrix taunted.

“I would rather see you to the castle if you’re tired.”

She rolled her eyes. His attempt at chivalry was an insult. She had noticed Rodolphus yawn only moments ago; how dare he paint her as if she needed to be protected and escorted. But Bellatrix did not bother to protest—she wanted to leave. She didn’t want to linger at the party another moment.

“Then let us go.”

“Wait. Lucius and Narcissa,” said Lestrange, waving them over from the corner in which they stood.

"Should we say good-bye to the host?" Narcissa asked as she neared, with a glance at Madam Lestrange, currently engaged in a conversation with old Cantankerous Nott.

"Don't bother, " replied Rodolphus. He set towards the fire, and Bellatrix and the others followed.

“Bellatrix,” a voice called behind them.

Bellatrix turned; Orion stood twenty paces from her, mouth twinged into a frown and grey eyes dark.

“I will follow in a minute,” Bellatrix muttered to her group. “See you in the common room.”

Lestrange hesitated, then continued towards the fire. Narcissa glanced over her shoulder with an ill-concealed look of concern, but then the flames flashed emerald, and the three of them had gone.

Bellatrix approached the place where her uncle stood waiting and, a few paces away, her aunt watched on.

“Uncle Orion.” The muscles in her face tensed involuntarily at the sight of his stiff, smug countenance. She bobbed; the slightest, least submissive curtsey she had ever performed.

“I want you to be warned,” said Orion. His mouth barely moved; his voice was as gruff as it had ever been. “A witch in the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black is valuable, and her blood is the purest and most precious of any in the Sacred Twenty-Eight. She is well-served to protect her reputation, distance herself from anything too conspicuous, and above all, preserve herself.”

As she realized what he meant, Bellatrix felt her teeth clash together in her mouth as if they tried to bite through each other. It was purity of flesh doctrine and domesticity doctrine all over again. She had failed to make herself heard to the Dark Lord this evening, so she would at least make her uncle hear her. She had waited to do so for years.

“I wonder, _Sir_ ,” hissed Bellatrix, forgetting that she was still in view of the public, “if you would raise such questions were I a wizard rather than a witch in the House of Black.”

Orion’s face furrowed into a deeply creased scowl, but Bellatrix had lost all will to be civil to him.

“Should one of your precious sons seek something conspicuous, as you put it, would you have any of the same objections?”

Orion’s tongue flicked over his chapped lips, his eyes slightly widened. The expression was fleeting, but Bellatrix recognized victory.

“I know your views,” she persisted. “You support everything this new movement does, everything He does, but your fear holds you back. Do not let it hold me back as well.”

“You are in dangerous territory, girl,” said Orion. “You verge on serious disrespect.”

“You can take nothing else away from me,” Bellatrix whispered. “I have been nothing but loyal to this House and this family, and you wouldn’t dare to cast me out.”

Orion jerked, as if he longed to yell—Bellatrix wondered if would reach for his wand, then she wondered if he would strike her with the flat of his hand.

He did neither. For he was weaker than her, and she saw him realize the truth she spoke. Vein throbbing in his temple, he strode away without saying another word.

Walburga still stood fixed where she had placed herself for the duration of the conversation. She looked at her niece. “Bellatrix.”

Bellatrix tore her eyes from the back of her retreating uncle.

“What?” she asked, too sharply.

“You never learned to watch your tongue,” snapped Walburga. Then something in her expression gave, and forth pursed a small, rare smile. “I see myself in you, you know, in spite of all your disobedience.” Her chin quivered as she nodded to herself. “Do not think you are the only one who has ever felt unseen.”

Bellatrix stared. Walburga had been born a Black and married her cousin, staying within her House, and therefore she had maintained more agency than other matronly witches Bellatrix knew. But still, Bellatrix saw the ways Walburga was house-bound behind her husband. Bellatrix thought she had little in common with the plump, grim witch before her.

Walburga fixed Bellatrix with a beady-eyed stare.

“You should be cautious. Orion is right about that, at least.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “I know a return to the old ways would do us all well, girl. I support the movement, and I support its leader. But one doesn’t throw their support to something before knowing how it will turn out. The Blacks are royalty, and one cannot compromise that position with hasty endeavors. Perhaps, in a few years…And as a witch, you can well support him quietly, without making yourself a fool.”

Bellatrix didn’t know what her aunt meant by all of this, but felt like she should disagree with it. She drew herself to her full height over her aunt, three inches shorter.

“I have to leave,” she said. “Goodnight, Aunt Walburga.”

Her aunt gave a clucking cackle. “You will see I am right, Bellatrix. Goodnight.”

Bellatrix spun away, flung Floo powder from the hanging vessel into the fire, and stepped inside the fireplace without a backwards glance.

“Slughorn’s office, Hogwarts.”

The ballroom, and the party, was obliterated in the churning of the flames.

Slughorn’s office was dark when Bellatrix emerged into it. The aged man was no doubt asleep. A glass clock chittering on the mantlepiece showed it to be past midnight. The corridors would be closed. She could probably rely on the Black name and Slughorn’s permission to extricate her if she was apprehended, but she did not feel like putting in the effort. Bellatrix wound her way from the office, carried down the corridor, and turned into the common room.

Lestrange and Malfoy were gone, but Narcissa was waiting up.

“The boys went to their dormitories,” she said, as if predicating Bellatrix’s question.

“Ah.”

Away from the lights and chinking glasses, Bellatrix remembered how young Cissy was. She had forgotten. Her sister’s hair was coming unbound and her eyes sagged as she huddled on a chair, looking small inside it. She was hardly more than a child.

“We—” Cissy yawned— “we should go to bed too.”

“You look as though you already have,” teased Bellatrix.

Narcissa gave a faint, drowsy smile before stifling another yawn. “But I— _oh_ , I wanted to talk to you.”

Bellatrix waited. Narcissa rubbed her arms.

“What did Orion say?”

“Nothing of importance.”

“Bella,” Cissy began in a soft voice, “are you really going to join the…the Death Eaters?”

Bellatrix said nothing, but her mind, her heart, her soul screamed yes.

She would, because she would not be shunted aside by Rodolphus or Malfoy. She would, because she would fight for her pure-blood place in the world. She would, because she wanted her magic to be strong and vital and her mastery of the Dark Arts to grow. She would, because her aunt and uncle’s caution had done nothing but spur her desires. She would, because the Dark Lord had been the most extraordinary wizard, leader, and man she had ever met.

Cissy was too clever not to notice Bellatrix’s internal dialogue or at least suspect it, even without a spoken answer.

“Be careful,” was all she said.

“Don’t tell Andromeda,” was all Bellatrix replied.

They walked down to the dormitory. Narcissa hugged Bellatrix sleepily before tiptoeing into the fourth-year room.

“I love you, Bella,” she sighed. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

As Bellatrix lay in her own dormitory, snippets of the evening seemed to float back to her. She twisted on her four-poster.

The thought that recurred most frequently was a pair of dark, cold, beautiful eyes; long-fingered hands holding potential energy, radiating power; a soft voice that slithered over secrets. She wanted his knowledge. She wanted his approval.

As she blinked up at the dark canopy overhead, listening to the sounds of the girls breathing all around, it occurred to her that very little about her meeting with Lord Voldemort felt happenstance. And he had been so charming. He had been complimentary but withholding, aloof but intense, and mysterious but confiding in perfect measure to appeal to her sensibilities. She couldn’t fathom why, but wondered if it had charmed her intentionally, plucking the desires from her mind and emulating each one. Or perhaps he just happened to be all the things she most admired.

Her eyes began to grow hot and heavy, and her mind drifted.

Bellatrix had once been told that Muggles had something they primitively called “the Devil.” When she and her compatriots had traded facts about those lowly creatures, they had thought this intensely funny; the Devil was not a demon at all, but a legend borne out of the fear of wizards, crafted with exaggerated terror. Bellatrix had barely thought about it since, except with occasional ridicule.

But sliding into sleep, for a reason she could not discern, she remembered the simple, crude Muggle story of a man who promised riches and lured people to their downfall, of a man who seduced the hungry to darkness, of a man with magic and burning eyes…

Perhaps she had met a Devil of her own, she mused as dreams began to overtake her. But never had the Devil danced so well, nor smiled so beautifully. And on that thought, she sunk into sleep.


	10. Andromeda’s Question

As the days lengthened and May traipsed towards June, all the 5th and 7th years flew into a fit of anxiety about the approaching O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s. Except for one.

Bellatrix had not thought it was possible for her to become any less invested in school, but after the fateful party, she realized that she had underestimated herself. It was not that she disliked learning; on the contrary, pursuit of new information was one of her dearest goals. She objected to the methodology. Frequently, she already knew the lessons being taught to her.

Bones merely had them review Stunning spells. Bellatrix could normally tolerate Defense, eager for any knowledge about the Dark Arts, but this lesson, like so many others, was old news. _If Bones knew some of the spells I have produced,_ she thought pridefully before giving up the lecture to doodle, _she would know I hardly need to Stun anymore_.

Bones went on about the ways in which Stunning spells could be lethal, all of which Bellatrix already knew: multiple spells, a particularly potent execution of the spell, a hit in a critical area such as the head or heart, on and on…

Bones lectured, “It is, thus, always necessary to shield against a Stunning spell, regardless of the opponent. Though innocuous, I need not remind you of the further damage that could befall a stunned witch or wizard while they are unconscious. And Stunning spells can be dangerous in of themselves, as I’ve said fatal, being difficult to repel through any means other than a direct Shield. Overconfidence never bodes well in a duelist, however skilled…”

Bellatrix could hardly wait for the bell to ring, just to save her from the boredom.

At least Defense Against the Dark Arts was simply dull, rather than hostile. More and more frequently, Bellatrix saw a thinly-veiled guises for political action in her lessons—with much of which she disagreed. In fact, she began to wonder if the professors anticipated the swelling tide on the horizon and tailored their lessons accordingly to discourage free-thought.

Professor Sinistra used her Arithmancy classroom as a platform to discuss numerology in cases of Dragon Pox, attempting to argue it merely affected pure-bloods with more frequency due to _inbreeding_. She tried to alleviate Mudbloods of all culpability for spreading the illness. Bile rose in Bellatrix’s throat at the topic. It was an inexcusable use of class time, she thought. On an unrelated note, her mother’s latest letter had been sickening—Bellatrix had stopped reading before the bottom and passed the parchment straight to Andromeda. The Pox had spread to Cygnus’s throat, apparently.

Seeing her distress, Evan whispered that they should protest by slacking— _a political action_ , he smirked. The two bewitched scraps of parchment to pelt a round-faced boy named Frank Longbottom whenever he wasn’t looking. It did not completely obliviate her anger, but it did make her laugh into her stack of notes when she succeeded in lodging one of the papers in Longbottom’s ear, and he turned around with a ludicrously foolish, bewildered expression, looking for the culprit he could not find.

She still had her nightly pursuits to sate her. Bellatrix had managed to cast the Imperius Curse on a beetle and scurry away a dozen bits of information about the Dark Arts. But her progress was beginning to plateau. She needed more resources. She needed experience. She needed something beyond what she could glean from books. Thankfully, the Dark Arts were not Bellatrix’s only hobby.

An interest had developed—no, a _fanaticism—_ for the Death Eaters and their leader. Any skepticism Bellatrix had possessed fled. She could only remember the bursting conviction she had felt at the party. She began to take the Prophet daily, scouring each paper for any new information. Word had begun to spread, and though everything was still shrouded in suspicion and mystery, no one could deny the sway that the Death Eaters wielded. People too afraid to hear the cry for change organized against them. Squibs were marching for rights in a series of gathering rallies, but it seemed Giants, operating under command from the Death Eaters, were marching on Squibs and Muggles.

 _Serves them right_ , thought Bellatrix, reading the story between bites of toast during lunch.

In a flurry of school-girl giddiness, she had even begun to make clippings and stash them in her night-stand. She listened to the words flying on people’s tongues through the halls of the school. There were murmurs. Bellatrix overheard students with their heads bent together: the disappearances that had not been dealt with satisfactorily by the Ministry. The Minister for Magic, Eugenia Jenkins, could only blabber the same nonsense about “sticking together in these troubling times.” Aurors had been dispatched. Branches of the Ministry were now making threats. But nothing could be done.

These whispers made Bellatrix glow with pride. Somewhere, the Dark Lord—or _her Lord_ , as she had begun to think of him—had thwarted the Ministry’s grasp.

She was like that, spread in her favorite spot in the courtyard and feverishly scanning the morning’s news, when Andromeda approached her.

Bellatrix had secreted the treasured paper into her bag while Andromeda began to complain that she had not seen Bellatrix in a week—not since Bellatrix had passed off their mother’s last letter. It was true, but Bellatrix thought the blame fell dully on Andromeda. She was never in the common room these days, always stashed away in the library reading or studying or who knew where else. Nonetheless, Bellatrix had wrenched her mind—somewhat guiltily—from where it had been revolving around a pair of dark, red eyes, and consented to spend a weekend day on the grounds with her sisters.

It was golden afternoon when the three set out, a perfect balmy late May day. The unfurling leaves stirred in a twinkling breeze, the sky shone a pure cornflower blue, and Narcissa rolled on the ground in laughter.

 “Stop it!” she shrieked. “Stop!”

Bellatrix brushed a tear of mirth budding in her eye and raised a staggering hand once more, pointing her wand at Narcissa. “ _Rictusempra_.”

Narcissa cried out in another flurry of hysteria.

“Bella, stop it…please…” she choked out between screams of wild laughter.

“That’s enough,” interrupted Andromeda.

Her voice took on the maternal cadence Bellatrix despised, but in the time it took Bellatrix to prepare a retort, Andromeda had already waved her own wand and muttered the counter-spell, and Narcissa was wheezing to her knees.

“You gave me _grass-strains_ ,” Narcissa told Bellatrix as soon as she had regained use of her voice. She inspected the front of her sullied robes in displeasure.

“Andromeda can fix it,” said Bellatrix, untroubled.

“I wouldn’t have to fix it if you had been more careful,” Andromeda chided, still sounding painfully maternal. She knelt beside Narcissa in the shadow of a twisted oak and attempted to siphon away the offending stain. “Honestly, Bella, I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately.”

Bellatrix swatted at a mosquito. “We were having a _laugh_ , Andy, that is all.”

“No, _you_ were laughing while you tortured her.”

“I am not _torturing_ her.” The mosquito evaded her once more, so Bellatrix flicked her wand and lit it on fire.

 _To torture someone_ , Bellatrix thought, _I now have much more potent spells at my disposal._ Though that would hardly be prudent to tell Andromeda.

“It is alright.” Narcissa smoothed her robes and took over cleaning them. “Bella is annoying, to be sure, but it _was_ rather funny.”

Bellatrix stuck her tongue out at Narcissa, who giggled.

Andromeda still looked miffed. “Why have you stopped eating breakfast?” she asked Bellatrix, as if this was a logical jump.

Bellatrix, all too familiar to Andromeda’s righteous anger, rolled her eyes. “I sleep in late.”

“You have shadows under your eyes.”

“Why _thank_ you.”

Andromeda ignored the sarcasm and surveyed Bellatrix critically. “And you look as though you’ve lost weight.”

“Well,” Bellatrix retorted, “where do you spend all your time these days?”

Andromeda’s cheeks pinked, but her grey eyes remained cool. “Studying. Some of us actually want to do well on our examinations.”

Bellatrix fiddled against the rough trunk of the oak. It was so rare that she and Andromeda were not fighting these days, and few things made the old restlessness creep into her bones as much.

Narcissa stood, presumably to protect her robes from any further damage. “Please stop,” she said. “We are all anxious lately, what with…”

She did not have to finish the sentence.

Andromeda peered at Bellatrix for a long moment, then sighed. “I am sorry, Bella. I don’t begrudge you extra sleep, it’s just—Do you promise that you would tell me, if there was…something you should tell me?”

Bellatrix looked at Andromeda, her hair a buttery brown in the sunlight, her round face creased in concern, her sharp eyes searching. Bellatrix thought of the Dark Arts, of the Death Eaters, of the Dark Lord.

“Of course, Andromeda,” Bellatrix answered with a soothing smile. “I could never keep anything from you.”

Andromeda looked placated. Bellatrix could hardly believe that her sister hadn’t guessed, but it seemed she had been successful at hiding everything, and it seemed Narcissa had kept her word from the night of the party.

The sun was high and round in the sky—it burned her eyes. She flipped onto her stomach in the grass, rules of decorum be damned. With a tentative smile, Andromeda followed suit, so they were both lying on their bellies across from each other, propped by their elbows. Narcissa gave a superior sniff, as if exasperated by her juvenile sisters, which made Andromeda laugh, and then Bellatrix began to laugh as well.

Some of the lingering tension in her chest eased.

“Do you know what I was just thinking of?” said N,arcissa after a moment, peering up at the dark, sun-kissed leaves above them. “Do you remember when we were children and mother used to take us on shopping trips in Diagon Alley?”

Bellatrix suspected that, in her own way, Narcissa was also trying to ease the tension. But she did remember, mostly with fondness, those long morning roams over the cobblestones, leaping past her sisters, darting beyond her mother’s watchful gaze.

“You always wanted to go to Madam Malkin’s.” Andromeda groaned. “I hated Madam Malkin’s.”

“You always wanted to look at books!” Narcissa laughed. “And Bellatrix was always begging to see the owls or pining to sit and stare at the cursed daggers in Borgin and Burke’s. Can you imagine? A seven-year-old, with a cursed dagger?”

“I would have done well with it,” said Bellatrix. She could recall, even then, being drawn to the shadows and secrecy of Knockturn Alley, delighted whenever their errands took them down that way, hanging to look at the artifacts on the shelves, reaching out to touch with buzzing fingers.

“I never liked that place,” said Andromeda, as if to herself. Then she quirked her eyebrow. “I never thought Bella liked the daggers; I always thought she wanted to go there because she fancied that strange shop-clerk.”

Narcissa clapped her hands in glee. “I had forgotten all about that—but I remember you telling me! Bella’s first and last love.”

Bellatrix snorted. She had the vague recollection of what they were talking about. When she had been six or seven, she would frequently tug her mother into Borgin and Burke’s to gaze at an impressive display of cursed daggers, and there had often been a handsome shop-clerk present. He would indulgently let her look at the daggers and murmur facts about them in her ear while she studied the display. Ever class-conscious, Druella was amused that her daughter would even speak to a shop-clerk. She had capitalized on the comedy by teasing Bellatrix as soon as they would leave the shop. Narcissa had seemed almost like a baby then, but Andromeda had been old enough to copy her mother’s joke. Now, Bellatrix could remember nothing about the shop-clerk or even what he had looked like.

 “Do you think we’ve changed since then?” asked Andromeda. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and scooted forward to kneel in the grass. “Things seem so different, but I don’t know if any of us really is.”

“I certainly am,” said Narcissa, arching her brows. “Now I know that Twilfitt and Tattings is _much_ better than Madam Malkin’s.”

The three of them laughed once more.

“You know,” said Andromeda softly, “I love you both. Through thick and through thin.”

Narcissa smiled. “I love you both too.”

“Through thick and through thin,” echoed Bellatrix. Just then, silhouetted against the springtime all around, she thought her sisters looked beautiful. Narcissa shone like silver: composed but impetuous, spun of her dreams like sugar and silk. Andromeda shone like copper: steady, tireless—often aggravating—but crackling with her special mixture of humor and kindness.

Narcissa began saying something about robes, prompted by her last comment about dress shops, and Bellatrix let her gaze drift out across the grounds.

The lake sparkled in the light, fractals glinting and jumping as they caught the sun. Enticing visions filled her head—she would like to strip to her socks and swim into the middle of the lake, let the cold blue water swallow her skin, lie on her back, naked before the sun…and then emerge, clad in dark robes, and join the Death Eaters like a force of nature, bow before Lord Voldemort and take her place, and perhaps then she could find use for a cursed dagger…

“They say that she will be married in June,” Narcissa was saying. Bellatrix’s focus drifted back to her sister.  Narcissa sighed, “Someday, we’ll all be married.”

Andromeda rolled her eyes in Bellatrix’s direction, full of anticipation: they both knew what was coming.

When Narcissa began, “Yesterday, Lucius—” Bellatrix drowned the rest of her sister’s words out in a groan. The thought of anyone—her sister much less—dreaming about marrying Malfoy was too rich to compensate.

“Don’t make fun,” chastised Narcissa. “It’s not fair, Bella, you’re never in love.”

 Bellatrix began shredding a nearby fallen leaf. “No. Because everyone around here is dull and ridiculous.”

Unprompted, into her head, rushed the thought of someone who was neither dull or ridiculous…someone who was not from there at all…the thought was confusing and confused, but the sunlight seemed to grow an inch darker and colder. Bellatrix shivered, fighting down a smile, and threw the leaf to the ground.

“Well, you shall have to marry sometime,” said Narcissa, undeterred. “I will certainly be engaged by the time _I_ come of age. And I fear your shop-clerk is likely taken.”

Bellatrix prepared a retort but broke off, distracted by Andromeda’s fidgeting.

“Do you think that we should have to marry?” Andromeda asked. She wasn’t looking at Bellatrix, but at her own hands, toying in her lap. “Marry…pure-bloods.”

“Well, of course they have to be pure-bloods. _Toujours Pur_ , Andy!” said Narcissa.

Bellatrix squinted knowingly at her sister in the sunlight, anticipating a grand joke. “Are you teasing?”

Apparently, Andromeda was not teasing. She tried again. “But Bella is always talking about how we shouldn’t have to listen to all of mother’s rules. Don’t you think the rule that we have to marry, and to someone like us, is just that? Just another silly rule?”

“It was a silly rule when Mother told me all witches should be _pure of flesh_.” Bellatrix sneered to cover her unease, propping herself higher in the grass, “And I never listened to that rule.”

Narcissa gave a series of delicate coughs that sounded almost like “ _Lestrange_ ,” “ _Yaxley_ ,” “ _Avery_.” Bellatrix swatted at her and Narcissa squealed.

Ignoring this exchange, Andromeda leaned forward. “What would you do if you didn’t have to marry anyone at all? Or if you could marry someone who wasn’t a pure-blood?”

“Andy!” gasped Narcissa, the laughter falling from her face. She looked scandalized.

Bellatrix furrowed her brow. She didn’t like this conversation. She didn’t like to think about specifics that far into the future—she was as incapable of imagining herself in love as she was imagining herself a wife. The impossibility of the first contrasted with the inevitability of the second, and it made her anxious. She wished the Black family would give her more time, at least. She wished they would allow her a career.

But Andromeda’s question raised in her a strange feeling of revulsion, deeper than all those concerns, but perhaps illuminating how imminent the future really was.

Wedding a pure-blood was more than some foolish rule, it was a _lifestyle_. It was so deeply intertwined with her identity and her family and, indeed, the way she saw the world. She would make a respectable match to ensure that her line would persist, protected by blood, and the bonds between the old families would grow stronger, and Bellatrix would know that she had offered her own deep, private sacrifice to her ancestors, to preserve her place in the world.

To not marry in that way…that meant you were either too undesirable to wed or that you had turned your back on your House.

It was about commitment to something sacred and intangible, something bigger than herself. It reminded her who she was and who she wanted to be. Bellatrix would rebel, in her many ways, but she would not turn her back on the House of Black.

 “I would not do it,” Bellatrix said. “Listen to yourself, Andromeda.”

“I didn’t say I would.” Spots of colour appeared on Andromeda’s cheeks. “I was just…wondering. If things were different.”

“But that never _can_ be different,” said Narcissa.

A bird chirped and spluttered in a nearby tree.

Bellatrix paused for a moment. An idea crept into her head, and she shook her long hair out of her face, raising her wand toward her sister covertly.

“ _Rictusempra_ ,” she whispered, and Andromeda’s startled frenzy of laughter was enough to push the conversation from her mind.


	11. The First Wizarding War

In the following days, despite Bellatrix’s apathy towards the matter, N.E.W.T.s really were upon them. The other seventh-years, wan from revisions, approached the week as if ascending the gallows. Bellatrix did not. She glanced through half her books. She spent a good while pelting Nott with the rest of them, flicking her wand to hurl them across the room, while warning him that he had better give her the answers, and he laughed so hard his reading glasses slid off his face.

The trial started with Charms: so dull it was truly arduous. Nott, Lestrange, and Evan had taken the class with her. The four of them joked in the Entrance Hall before they were ushered into the Great Hall, crowed by an influx of desks. Courtesy of her name, Bellatrix was always in the front of the room come exam time. She finished in what she thought should be record time and spent the rest of the time trying to remember every detail of a certain dance at a certain party.

The exams progressed, alternating written and practical tests. Next was Transfiguration, Astronomy, Ancient Runes, History of Magic, Potions, and finally Defense. One question on that test brought her fully to laughter, to the consternation of the staring students around her:

_Describe the effects of the Unforgivable Curses and how to best defend against them._

 

Just as Bellatrix had thought, everything was incredibly easy. Tedious, even. A few questions had spiked her interest, a few spells that she had been asked to perform, and for those she had roused her considerable passion and approached the task with vigor. But most of the testing was simply memory recollection—writing out what she knew, waving her wand in the pattern she remembered, saying the words she could recall. The examiners all watched her with tense expressions, as if fearing any person or magic that challenged them. Or maybe everyone simply looked tense these days.

When the week of exams was done, there was little left to do but anticipate the end of term feast. Ravenclaw would win, typical boring twats. Bellatrix enjoyed abusing them through the upset as much as any of the other Slytherins. Everyone knew they had rightly deserved to win, had Dumbledore not been biased. The subject felt hallow, though. As did the congratulations everyone kept waving her way. The smirk Bellatrix dealt them in response felt like an automaton.

Narcissa wanted to go to Hogsmeade; Andromeda, where she could be found, wanted to revisit every detail of her tests; Bellatrix, without really caring, anticipated the final dueling club meeting of the year. Macnair had forbidden her from skiving off: she had him money to win back.

Just like that, Bellatrix was done with her official school education. What had it gotten her? Something, surely. But not enough. She felt hungry. She was hungry in her bones, in her soul. She was tired during the day, but she could not fall asleep at night. If she was not perusing her Dark Arts books, she would stay staring at the canopy above her as the dark droned slowly on, her eyes sagging but her mind and body whirring.

The morning after one such night, the day before the feast, two days before the scarlet steam engine would creep up to the station and take her permanently away from the castle, Bellatrix wandered onto the grounds. It was the crack of dawn, and she was alone.

The lake spread before her. She walked up to meet it. Today, it was an open mouth, sloshing in tandem with the heavy mass of grey clouds above. Would it rain? Bellatrix longed for a storm, for a true, honest release, for the heavens to split in catharsis and chaos and ravage every mundane village and barley field across the country.

In two days, she would be free. But she would be utterly trapped. She would be shut in Blackhall Manor, with her wasting Mother, belittled for failing to secure an engagement, touted from dinner to tea to dinner with the same old people, oppressed and censored by her overbearing aunt and uncle, subjected to Sirius’s smugness. She would have to see her father…her dying father…and it would be impossible to hide her interests from Andromeda at such close quarters. If she could not find a way out, the rest of her life would extend just the same.

Words drifted back to her: _They trained you to be a warrior and then put you in a cage…how cruel…_

Bellatrix kicked off her boots and stockings. She clutched her robes and waded into the icy lake. Thick, cold mud gushed between her toes. An inch of fabric trailed in the water; Druella would scold, but Bellatrix could not care.

She felt as though she was the only person in the entire world. It was too early and dark for anyone else. She wished the world would erupt.

She swore to herself, there, standing in the lake, that she would find a way out. She did not know how, but somehow, she would rise up to meet her destiny. She would pledge herself to Lord Voldemort. She would become a Death Eater, and not just any Death Eater, but an instrumental, fierce, undaunted champion of the cause. She would become the Dark witch she was always meant to be, and the Black family would be proud of her.

Bellatrix did not know what she had expected, thinking her fierce thoughts beneath the skies thick with impending storms—a revelation, perhaps. A shattering. No such thing happened.

She stuck her wet feet back into her stockings and shoes.

Bellatrix entertained the thought of running from the castle. But she would be inevitably recognized somewhere, and she would hate to be incognito.

Her stomach gave a feeble growl.

Having nothing better to do, Bellatrix trudged back toward breakfast. She was like that: damp, hungry, and desperate when everything changed.

Mounting the steps into the castle, Bellatrix first noticed that the Entry Way was quiet. It was strange; the babble of student voices often drifted from the Great Hall, especially during mealtimes. But the stone walls were cathedral-like. She looked back and forth, cognizant of the faint sound of water, dripping from the hem of her robe. All the portraits in the entry way were empty.

What could it be? Some strange new rule? An end-of-term gathering in another part of the castle she had forgotten? A death?

A sense of foreboding flushed her body as she approached the Great Hall.

The sight inside was staggering.

The entire student and staff population seemed to be contained under the darkening morning skies. They were so still they could have been a museum. The only speaking was whispers, coursing below the oppressive hush like a dry wind through grass. Even the ghosts were present, hanging eerily in air. Bellatrix heard a sob, somewhere in the corner.

The shining food sat untouched on the tables. Sausages stewed in sticky juices and polished plump grapes dripped from bunches in bowls. It looked like a still-life.

For some clue, Bellatrix looked to her compatriots. The change between their behavior and the rest of the hall was remarkable. The boys traded smiles and eager glances. Halfway up the table, Malfoy's smirk was more pronounced than ever.

And that could only mean one thing.

Head down as she strode toward them, Bellatrix tried not to seem ignorant, just in case anyone had noticed her entrance into the Hall. She slid between Nott and Rodolphus. She felt Lestrange’s leg jiggling frantically beneath the table, against her own. Nott struggled to suppress a grin. Macnair’s eyes glinted. Only Evan looked pale beneath his freckles and golden hair.

Mutely, Lestrange drew a paper from his hand and placed it before Bellatrix. Her eyes seemed to take it in for a long moment without reading it. But a strange, subterranean, euphoric joy swelled from the depth of her stomach.

**_WE ARE AT WAR_ **

_Emergent pure-blood supremacist group known as the Death Eaters, led by presence known only as Lord Voldemort, launches stunning and violent display of strength. Ministry has had no choice but to declare civil war. At recent rally..._

Beneath the headline, there was a photograph of a symbol lighting the sky above the tilting, cracked roofs of Diagon Alley. A serpent, beautiful and terrible, was twisting from the mouth of a skull in a mass of murky emerald, like a mysterious cloud. Below the dazzling shape, brighter than the moon, a phalanx of people watched. They wore dark robes. Masks obscured their faces.

Feverish, Bellatrix flew through the rest of the article. At what was planned to be the largest squib rally to-date, the Death Eaters had interrupted by force, taking certain organizers hostage, unveiling their symbol, and marching. But then, the “shadowy presence” known as Lord Voldemort had spoken—Bellatrix bit her tongue to suppress a manic burst of giggling—from somewhere hidden, projecting his voice magically and personally. She skimmed the transcript of his speech, where he declared his resolution to end pure-blood oppression and design a new world with magic at its head.

_No more,_ her Lord had said, _will spells be controlled by a biased and repressive government. No more will we be prevented for flexing the extent of our power and natural dominance. No more will wizards be forced to shrink in the shadows of muggles. A new era,_ he said, _has begun._

And Bellatrix agreed. She agreed with every word.

The silence in the hall persisted when Bellatrix emerged from the thralls of the paper. The environment was crushing and all-suffocating. Bellatrix didn’t dare to raise her voice, though there were an infinite number of things she wanted to cry forth in joyous rebellion.

 Bellatrix wanted to take Rodolphus’s hand and pull him from the hall, desperate to discuss, already planning how she could prove her new allegiance.

She extended her fingers and connected with his beneath the table. She felt his blood pulse beneath his warm skin. She had just begun to tug, insisting departure, when Dumbledore's’ voice rang through the hall.

Bellatrix withdrew her fingers: leaving now could be incriminating.

“I have long feared,” said the Headmaster, “that such Dark times have been approaching. I have never so hoped to be incorrect. I wish I could deliver a different message to you. Unfortunately, I cannot. And I wish none of you to remain in the dark.”

His voice was clearer than Bellatrix had before heard it. He stood at the Headmaster’s podium, eyes hard beneath his spectacles, gray beard trailing. She had long seen him as something between a spiteful hypocrite and a doddering old fool. She knew his political sympathies, which he insisted on preaching throughout the school. She knew his fear mongering intolerance towards the Dark Arts. She knew his inherent bias against her house, Slytherin, in favor of his own Gryffindor, and his unflinching, biased dislike toward Bellatrix, her comrades, and the rest of the pure-blood elite.

But now, in spite of her hatred, she saw a strength the soft-spoken old man rarely embodied. A threat.

But no match for her and her Lord.

The Great Hall hung on Dumbledore’s every word.

He continued, “It is time for all of you to decide your own allegiance. Will you stand by and allow darkness and intolerance to rule your heart? Or will you use your power from right, for good, to foster understanding and love? I have hoped, in this school, to teach not only magical abilities, but magical responsibility. You are never too young to make a difference, and it is never too late or too early to fortify yourself from Darkness.”

Bellatrix thought she saw his roving, piercing gaze hover on her end of the Slytherin table. For a moment, the Headmaster’s alarmingly blue eyes seemed to stare straight at her, as if he knew every secret desire and belief cavorting through her soul. Bellatrix did not look away. She made no attempt to hide her feelings. He warned against darkness, but Bellatrix had never been afraid of the dark.

Dumbledore gazed once more to the student body as a whole. “The wizard who calls himself Lord Voldemort is one of the Darkest and most dangerous wizards I have ever seen pass through these halls.” The students stirred, a tumult of nervous bodies and bloodless faces. They did not like hearing his name, Bellatrix realized.

Dumbledore stood like a statue. “If we can have any hope of purging such evil from our community, we must speak frankly and face truth bravely. And as the Prophet struggles to provide the information I believe it is crucial for young witches and wizards to know, I have the difficult task of giving it to you.

“The wizard calling himself Lord Voldemort was once a student here. He was once young, scared, and angry. He let evil nest in his soul. I ask you, do not follow his example. With light, with love, with pursuit of goodness and truth, we can cast those like him out.”

Dumbledore stood framed against the roiling, blackening clouds in the sky of the Great Hall, his gray robes spread, his white hair streaming, his arms raised as if entreating the students, his eyes raised as if imploring the heavens. For a fleeting instant, Bellatrix thought he reminded her of some painting she had seen, of an old man in a storm, lone and powerful and appealing to the gods.

But there were no gods here, and there were no devils. There were only witches and a Lord. Dumbledore stood not a chance.

“We are at war,” the Headmaster said finally. “Never forget who the truth enemy is. It is not your friends, it is not the students of another house, it is not your neighbor, it is not those of another background or blood status from yourself. It is Lord Voldemort.”

The silence rang as if the moments after a gong.

Then, proudly, quickly, a Hufflepuff with long inky plaits stood. In the mass of seated students, she was like the last piece on a chessboard. Illuminating the tip, she raised her wand.

“I stand with Dumbledore,” she said, and her voice was not loud, but it was carrying.

A cluster of Hufflepuffs immediately moved to stand with her, copying the motion, and in the time it took Bellatrix to blink her eyes, the entire Gryffindor table had done the same. Next were the Ravenclaws, and soon it was a wave that swept across the Great Hall.

Bowing to the momentum, even Slytherins that had pointedly sat began to rise. Tears hung in Dumbledore’s eyes.

Bellatrix saw Lucius smirk and lazily extend his wand arm, as if inviting the world to mock some grand joke with him. She picked out her sisters, sitting farther up the table. On Lucius’s heels, Narcissa had risen to her feet, the portrait of control. Her face was an expressionless mask; her eyes regarded her own feet without a hint of thought behind them.

Andromeda was the opposite. She was chewing vigorously on her lip, Bellatrix could tell, the way she always did in distress. Andromeda seemed to glance to something in the room, across the hall— _was she soul-searching?_ Bellatrix wondered—and then, Andromeda climbed to her feet. Her shakiness left her as she tilted her chin, almost defiantly, and lifted her arm. The wand glowed in her hand.

Bellatrix bit down irritation. She would have to deal with her sister later. The time had come for her to make a choice—to stand, to sit. Even her comrades had begun to stand, resigned. Nott gave a flickering roll of his eyes before hopping to the side of the bench, Macnair winked, and Evan stood uncertainly, his freckles sharp against the milk-paleness of his face.

Lestrange rose to his feet. Bellatrix had thought that he, too, had conceded, but then he walked away from the table, letting the doors of the Hall swing shut behind him.

A burst of pride for Lestrange hit her.

But Bellatrix did not follow him.

She kept her seat, the only one in the Hall. Bellatrix felt the eyes on her like pricks of heat. Now, with everyone standing, _she_ was the conspicuous one, the last piece on the board.

Dumbledore had said to eat. Bellatrix speared a bit of blood pudding and ate it with relish.

Then, because she could, she grinned.

 


	12. Traitor

Evan seemed to finally lose his will to evade her. She had pinned him in the hidden staircase off the third floor, and it was there that he leaned against the curving stone wall of the deserted passage, winded and grim. “Why are you chasing me?”

“Why are you running from me?” she shot back.

“I do not want to talk to you, that’s why.”

Bellatrix fingered her wand. “You are talking to me just now.”

Evan smashed his hand against the wall and then crumpled his face inside his palms. Bellatrix watched this display of weakness without feeling entirely certain what she was supposed to do.

“How long have you known?” Evan spat out.

“Known what?” Though Bellatrix suspected what he would say.

Evan fixed her with a pained stare. “Known about—my father.”

“Who told you?”

“Bloody Malfoy of all people,” he laughed darkly.

Bellatrix internally cursed Lucius for his ever-present meddling. But something did not make sense.

“Malfoy told me as well,” said Bellatrix. “But he told me I should not tell you.”

“Delightful,” sneered Evan. “Does it surprise you that Malfoy is only in it for himself?”

“But I don’t understand why,” she muttered.

Doubting her every move, she sat on the stairs a few steps below Evan, where he had sunk to sitting above her.

“I... I understand why you are upset, cousin.” Truly, she did. She hated any information that was concealed from her; she still resented Malfoy for lording his over her. Had she known about her uncle sooner, opportunities might have presented themselves. She could not even conceive the shame of having a father so involved without knowing of it. “I understand, but--”

“Do you?” asked Evan. The jumping shadows of a nearby torch rendered him even paler than usual.

Bellatrix continued, “Yes, of course, the missed opportunities--”

He cut her off with a puff of bitter laughter, smearing his face through his hands. “Missed opportunities? You understand nothing, Bellatrix.”

“Damn you, Evan!” she snapped, losing her temper. “What then? Bloody well be a man and tell me once in your life!”

She almost wondered if her temper would coax him into anger to spur some clarity, but he said nothing. Nothing was ever easy, Bellatrix told herself as she leaned close to Evan to try a different approach.

“We now have the chance,” she urged in a low voice, “to make up for being left in the dark. We have the chance to join my uncle, your father. He can be our way in. I was planning to tell you, to ask you how we can contact him. Roderick can see us into the Death Eaters! And then there will be no need for Lucius’s mind games, or anything else.”

“But that is just it, Bellatrix,” said Evan. “I am not sure.”

“About what?” she asked. Her voice reverberated against the stones. “You are not sure about—about the Death Eaters?”

A sullen, tense nod was his answer.

Bellatrix laughed. “Well what then? What about them are you unsure of?”

Evan licked his lips. “They are killing people, Bellatrix.”

“Not people,” she said. “Squibs and Mudbloods.”

“A year ago, Bellatrix, you would not have said that.”

Bellatrix watched him, motionless. Much had changed in a year. Much had changed in the last month. A year ago, the whole of herself had been wrapped in the power Orion had to validate or dismiss, she had been nothing but a mouthpiece for her family, clinging desperately to their promise to make her extraordinary—a promise they had broken. She had been asleep. A year ago, Lord Voldemort had only been a whisper, as curious and exciting as a fable. Now that she was awake and he was as real as herself, as her hunger, and his hands had brushed her waist, she could never again return to the little that had existed before.

Evan ran his fingers through his hair. “Of course they are inferior, of course they don’t deserve rights, of course we are better. But still...they are people, are they not? Their lives count for something.”

“While Mudbloods continue,” argued Bellatrix, “they pose a threat to us. To our lifestyle. They hate us and would destroy us if they could.”

“Maybe,” mumbled Evan, looking miserable. “But for some reason, I cannot bear to imagine my father killing men on the streets. Even if they deserve to die, who gave him that power?”

Bellatrix plumbed her heart, trying to articulate it.

“In war, there are casualties. If you have obtained the power to kill,” she said, staring at Evan, “then you are strong enough to wield it. People kill rats who have infested their homes, rats that bring illness. Mudbloods bear illness and they have infested the wizarding world. It is just the same.”

Evan glanced down the stairwell, making sure they were still alone. “Maybe you are right,” he said, and she saw a flicker of his regular disaffected composure reassumed.

Bellatrix leaned forward on the step. “I am right. And that power could be ours, too, yours and mine. We have the chance to be part of something, cousin. Do not let fear hold you back.”

Evan set his jaw. “No,” he said. “I will not. A momentary lapse—I am ready. For whatever lays ahead.”

“Good,” said Bellatrix, springing to her feet. “Tonight, after dueling club, at midnight, I have asked Lestrange to tell us everything he knows. And we will join.”

Evan nodded coolly. “I will see you then.”

Bellatrix grinned. She clattered down the staircase, leaving Evan sitting.

It was really happening. Everything, somehow, was falling into place, more cleanly than if she had dreamt it.

It had taken a while for the display in the Great Hall to pass, though it finally had. No one ever thinks about the denouement of such theatrical gestures, and the sight of students lamely pocketing their wands and awkwardly resuming their seats brought a smile to Bellatrix’s lips—the gesture had been posturing, nothing so grand or epic as the students participating seemed to think, and utterly ineffective. The twinkling light of a wand would hardly keep Dark forces at bay. Outside, the plans for war would gather momentum. More so, the moment was urged to a close by Dumbledore’s wet, choked thanks and insistence that everyone resume their meal. The students either had, or they had fled, lacking appetite. Bellatrix wondered if she had ever felt more ravenous, but after luxuriating in her third scone, she had risen with a sense of conviction. There were matters to be attended to.

First was Lestrange. She had taken a wild stab at where to find him, but he had not been in the common room, nor the perpetually empty classroom on the sixth floor that was one of his haunts. She finally found him by complete happenstance, reclining against one of the lancet windows open to the courtyard. Rain was drenching the plot of grass outside, some buffeting onto their robes, but they had stayed.

There, they had made their plan. Bellatrix fiercely and Rodolphus somewhat reluctantly, but he at last conceded. They would gather in the common room at midnight. If it was safe, they would proceed there. If not, they would find another place to converge. Rodolphus would tell them as far as he could, how they would fill to swell the ranks of the Death Eaters.

He had volunteered to seek Nott, Macnair, and his own brother. Bellatrix had the task of finding and convincing her cousin.

She had seen him, ducking into the mass spilling from the Great Hall when she had passed back through the Entry way, but he had avoided her eye, ignored her call, and evaded her pursuit. The chase had then commenced. But she had conquered the challenge, cornering him, and he was now on her side. And all was slipping neatly into place.

Bellatrix felt flushed from her running. She could feel the sweat blistered along her arms, in the crest of her hair. The heat was not only derivative from the torpid, humid day, thick as a rag around the stone halls, dissolving into thunderstorms—it was her own heat, the fire sparking in her blood.

She hurried to the common room, past grim files of students, some with salt-streaks dried on their faces, some shaking with fear. They were mourning.

It was a funeral pyre—the false world began to incinerate until only the old, pure, Dark world would be left, with Bellatrix and all her friends and kin, more powerful than they had even dreamed and free from fear at last. Bellatrix would be there to dance on the ashes.

Back in her dormitory, she rinsed her face and her hands in the water basin. She ran an ivory brush through her dark, shining hair, admiring the effect against the pallor of her skin and her prominent collarbones. She liked to look well—and deadly, she thought with a smile at herself in the mirror. The way a warrior should.

Bellatrix needed to look well. She was going into battle.

It was time Andromeda learned, both of Bellatrix’s true plans, and of the way she should behave from now on. Standing in the Great Hall had been pardonable. Save Bellatrix, everyone else had done it, and Bellatrix knew better than to hold everyone to her own standards of strength. She could even allow that, in terms of avoiding suspicions, following the motion of the crowd would have been more prudent.

It was Andromeda. Bellatrix knew her. She knew her sister’s conservative tendencies, her habit of hovering in the middle, trying to stay aware of both sides, rather than boldly claiming a position. Andromeda had always liked to be nice rather than strong; she shied away from drastic measures. All of these personality traits left her painfully open to the influence of other people.

Bellatrix would declare her loyalty to the right side of the war before Andromeda. Perhaps her sister, restricted by fear, would take some convincing, but Bellatrix was sure, in the end, they would be united beneath the proper cause.

Starved from all the mad dashing around, Bellatrix first stopped by the Hall for lunch. It was a sober affair, still overly quiet, only a smattering of students on the benches. Andromeda was not among them.

After lunch, the hunt began in earnest. Clambering up the marble staircase, Bellatrix reflected that this was the third time she had been made to look for someone today. It would be worth it if she could only secure Andromeda’s approval and make it to the secret meeting that night.

Bellatrix had a hunch that Andromeda would be in the library. Though everything felt flipped on its head today, she had been spending so much time there lately.

Bellatrix swung into the library, beneath the rounded arch that divided the large room from the rest of the corridor.

She allowed herself a moment to admire the high, vaulted ceilings, the fixture of rosy stained glass, and the vast collection of words, books, and hidden knowledge stowed beneath the thick stone walls. This would be the last time Bellatrix ever set foot in the library, and since the morning’s news had transformed her mood, she could spare a second for fond recollection. The second passed swiftly. Sentiment abated. Bellatrix resumed scanning the backs of seated students, prying for a head of thick brown hair...

The library, like the other spaces Bellatrix had been by today, was sparsely peopled. It didn’t surprise her.

But not one of the few present heads resembled the one so familiar to her. Bellatrix paced up the rows, peering into various study corners. A girl bent over a Defense book in one. Bellatrix traced her fingers up and down leather bindings as she walked. She passed an amorous couple, nestled close.

Bellatrix looked around. The storm seemed to have passed, and honeyed light filtered in through the mullioned windows. The pane of stained glass lit a flower-tinted patch on the ground.

Perhaps Andromeda was not in the library after all. Where else could she be? Inconveniently, there were a million places to hide in the castle. Even Andromeda, not noted for her secrecy, could likely remain undetected and unmolested in some odd nook or cranny until she wanted to be found.

A murmur of voices crept through the silence: the couple Bellatrix had just passed, whispering to one another behind a row of shelves.

“Everything will be different,” heard Bellatrix—a soft male voice. “But we’re together.”

Bellatrix rolled her eyes and considered moving on, but curiosity or some other force stalled her. Maybe she wanted to hear how people on the wrong side of the war were rationalizing these events. Maybe it was information she was seeking. Maybe it was a queer, slithering sense of foreboding, so slight she could barely detect it, fluttering in her breast.

The answering female voice was quieter. Bellatrix had to strain. It said something that sounded like “and terrace,” but Bellatrix knew she must have misheard. There was another soft sentence, words Bellatrix couldn’t catch, that ended in “for how long.” No; “for how long?” It was a question.

The boy spoke again, still in his warm mutter. “I’m sure they’ll come around. They love you, don’t they?”

“You don’t understand,” came the soft answer from the girl. “But they love me.”

“And I love you. I love you, ‘Dromeda.”

Bellatrix’s fingers clamped on the shelf she had been caressing, her nails digging against the soft old wood.

No. She must have misheard again. But had she not listened because there was something familiar? Was that what had drawn her in? Bellatrix craned to the side, stepping as lightly as possible, and peered through the crevice separating two shelves. Through the narrow slit, she could see shapes moving—the couple, except it was not a couple.

It was the Mudblood she had seen at dueling club, stroking a brown-haired, familiar head, whispering “’Dromeda.”

And the head turned—just a bare shift, and Bellatrix saw her sister plant a kiss on Ted Tonks’s impure cheek.

Bellatrix’s ears rang. Like screaming. Her face felt as though it were melting, heat blooming out of her pores. Her hands shook. She wondered if she would faint, but Bellatrix had never been the fainting type. And neither was she the type to flee.

“What in Salazar’s name do you think you are doing?”

Her hiss had started them. They disentangled.

Andromeda looked like she had been gutted. Her mouth moved in strangled shapes, saying nothing.

The cocky Mudblood bastard took a moment’s pause, then extended a hand—a hand that had a moment before been tangled in her sister’s hair. Defiling it.

“I don’t believe we’ve ever been formally introduced.” The filth had the gall to smile. “I’ve seen you at dueling club though, and I know you’re ‘Dromeda’s sister.”

Not as impervious to the awkwardness, apparently, as he had first seemed, he retracted his hand and smeared it on his pants. Andromeda seemed incapable of saying anything.

“So... are you looking forward to the final duel tonight?” the boy said weakly. Bellatrix did not reply but tried to incinerate him with a look. The boy seemed immune to incineration. He gave a sheepish smile. “You and me might be facing off, I think.”

Bellatrix hated his unshakable nerve because it undermined her own power. She stopped trying to terrify him into running and turned her focus to Andromeda.

“How could you?”

Andromeda shook her head like she was trying to buffet Bellatrix away. Bellatrix continued, “Andy, what have you done?”

“Wait—some other time,” stammered Andromeda. “I haven’t done anything wrong, just let me talk to you, some other time, Bella, I—”

“No. That name is for family.”

“Bella?” Andromeda’s face was drained a blood, cadaverous, stiff. “What do you mean, Bella?”

There was an uncomfortable stabbing sensation around her chest that made it hard to concentrate, hard to say the words. “You cannot call me that. You are no longer my family.”

Tonks shrank back, but Andromeda thrust herself to her feet. “Listen to me—just talk to me—”

“You surrendered that privilege,” snarled Bellatrix over the low thrum pulsing in her eardrums. “I have nothing more to say to you.”

She had a thousand more things to say, but she couldn’t find the words.

Bellatrix decided to make her exit.

It was not retreat. It was a powerful and sleek departure from the pleas of a traitor. It was a surgical, precise extraction. That was what Bellatrix told herself as she stumbled past the stained-glass fractals that splintered the sun into hard candy shards, leered through the bookshelves like a drunk beggar, and wrenched her way out of the library, into the corridor.

Why was drawing breath so difficult? Was it possible for a heart to beat so fast that it would simply stop? Hers might, she thought. Hers might.

She had left them, left them far behind, but she was still seeing Andromeda and the Mudblood as clearly as looking at them. The traitor and the Mudblood. The Mudblood and...

There was a window up ahead. Bellatrix flew to it. The air was thick with the memory of rain and hot with the reinvigorated evening sun. It steamed and sweltered as she attempted to gasp it into her shuddering, protesting lungs. Was it possible to drown out of water?

Perhaps Bellatrix would be gloriously, disgustingly sick and retch out of the window. Her sick would fall down three stories and settle in some vile puddle on the ground. She restrained herself with difficulty. Warriors did not need to be sick.

It took time, but Bellatrix calmed herself, as calm as she could possibly be.

Nothing was amiss, she told herself; there was no loyalty, no need to feel. No regret. This process was clinical. The girl was not even her sister anymore; she had forfeited the family. It was just a girl, a girl hanging on to the threads of Bellatrix’s life like a rotten molar tied by threads to the gum. Bellatrix could pair away the foulness, as easily as slicing off a thumb. As easily as yanking a tooth.

Lessons had to be learned and connections severed. Her aunt had once told her that family trees needed to be pruned.

Such it was. Such it would be with Andromeda.


	13. The Unforgivable Curse

“You look like hell,” Macnair said, sidling up to her. The edges of his weak mustache twitched unpleasantly when he smirked.

“Because I look fiery and dangerous?” she asked, not bothering to slow her pace as she continued down the marble stairs toward the Great Hall. “Many thanks.”

He chuckled and blustered to catch up to her furious strides, fishing for a reply. “Wit,” he said at last, somewhat awkwardly, incapable of producing anything better.

Bellatrix rolled her eyes. “Yes, you are the model of it yourself. With a reply as witty as that, it’s a wonder we ever speak.”

“I like matching wits with you.”

His breath reeked of onions. Bellatrix found herself even less tolerant than normal of his piteous attempts at flirtation. In her current mood, everything prickled.

“We could never match, Macnair, I far outstrip you at everything.” Her reply was sharp, lacking any coy bent the words might have carried. She saw him flinch in response.

He tended to get sulky when chastised, especially by a woman, but Bellatrix didn’t waste an ounce of energy worrying about it. It was good for him, she thought.

“Well,” he huffed, “hopefully you can outstrip Tonks tonight at dueling club, you owe me money from bleeding Nott.”

Bellatrix stopped in her tracks, feet from the entryway to the Great Hall. “What did you say?” she asked.

“You owe me money, Black. Don’t try to worm your way out of it now.” He grinned at her stupefied expression. “If you think playing dumb will get you out of it, I say that’s not very _witty.”_ He looked unreasonably proud to have finally thought of a parry. But Bellatrix could not even hear him. Her ears felt as if they had fallen deaf.

“Did you hear me, Black? I said that’s not very—”

“Shut up _,_ ” Bellatrix said, her voice a thing of cold fury.

“What—”

“I said, _shut up_.”

The grin crumpled from Macnair’s face with another twitch of his wispy mustache. Perhaps even he, notoriously dense, could sense the danger in her shaking fists and white lips.

“Is everything alright, Black?”

“I WANT YOU TO SHUT UP.”

He took a step backwards and stumbled on a hitch in one of the stones. Finally, he seemed to muster the good sense to remain silent. Bellatrix whipped away from him, to give herself a moment to think. She wished Macnair was gone. She hated to feel like this, hated to be like this, she needed time to take control—but she had no control.

She had forgotten. The scum had said, and she had vaguely remembered. But she had been hiding, avoiding everything since stumbling onto Andromeda’s betrayal, trying her best not to think of it, or anything—

And now she had to duel the bastard, under the maddeningly chary supervision of Bones and the infernal guise of sportsmanship. She didn’t want to look at him. Looking at him would make it real.

It _was_ real. Swift measures had to be taken, Bellatrix knew this. She believed this, but she just could not do it yet. Everything, once so streamlined, accumulating into the makings of glory, was cracked into ugliness like a fractured ceramic. Thinking about it was as comfortable as fingering the resultant jagged shards. Bellatrix had been left with a handful of blood.

Did she tell Narcissa? Write her mother, write Aunt Walburga? Were they to travel on the train from Hogwarts together? What power did Bellatrix have over her family, or her sister, or even her own thumping heart? If there was anything she hated, it was this feeling: too full, too pungent, too coarse and slippery and incapacitating.

 She found herself wondering what she would do if the Dark Lord were here. If she were in his service, she was sure she would have the answers. What would one of his devotees do in this instance? What would he himself do?

Certainly not quaver in the entry way. And neither would she.

Bellatrix forced herself to put her anger on hold. Not dismissing it, merely storing it for future use.

When she faced Macnair, she tried to assume the most careful expression she could. Perhaps she did not entirely succeed, because he still looked terrified.

“So,” she said, “Nott agreed to bet against me?”

Macnair’s eyes darted from her, to the left, back to her, as if uncertain of what had just happened, and whether he should comment on it.

“Wager of sorts,” he muttered.

Bellatrix bared her teeth in a dangerous smile. “Glad you have finally put your money on the proper side.”

Macnair gave a shaky laugh. “Right.”

An awkward silence spanned a few seconds, Bellatrix not speaking because she had nothing to say to him, Macnair because it looked like he was fighting for the courage to speak up.

In another few moments he seemed to have found it.

“Say…Black. Where, where have you been this afternoon?”

Her attention snapped back to him, where he stood shifting from foot to foot.

She made a decision. “Planning,” she said, keeping her expression controlled. “What does it concern you? Am I accountable to keep you updated on my whereabouts, now? Have you become my mother?”

He shook his head, looking alarmed. “Well, we’re—you know. We are— _friends_ , and all.”

It struck Bellatrix suddenly that she rarely thought of them that way. The revelation hovered strangely on her mind, for a moment, but it was just an amalgam to the other uncomfortable thoughts she was ignoring, so she pushed it away.

Bellatrix settled for nodding.

“And if…” Macnair continued awkwardly, avoiding eye contact, “if something is amiss, the matter, or…if I could—you know. You could say so, um, to me.”

The last few words were a bare mumble, but she knew he meant it. Bellatrix briefly considered what it would be like to tell him, to admit that her sister had sullied the family name by consorting with Mudbloods, and that Bellatrix was ashamed and confused and worried and furious and that she hadn’t the faintest idea what to do about it.

The notion was as welcome as sucking on broken glass.

“I understand.” She had not meant to sound terse, but she could not seem to help it.

Macnair ducked his head. “Well,” he said, trying to gloss over the sticky moment with his normal lack of grace. “At least we have the—the meeting to look forward to.”

Bellatrix nodded. “The meeting.”

For that at least made sense—the meeting would provide the clarity which the other events of today had stripped away.

Macnair cocked his head to the door of the Great Hall. “Shall we, er, go in, then?”

Bellatrix had no further objections, so in they went.

The normal crowd at dueling club with swollen by dozens of others. It seemed, in spite of the morning’s news, the final matches had still attracted a healthy number of spectators. Maybe, Bellatrix considered, people were especially eager to scope out the dueling talents of their fellow students _because_ of the recent events.

The scheduled matches were penned by a piece of chalk, deliberately scrawling names without a hand to direct it, onto a large blackboard that had been set up at the back of the room.

Sure enough, Bellatrix’s name was at the dead end of the roster, across from a name that rushed out at her like poison: Tonks.

How had it taken her so long to notice him? He had only joined the club that year, she was sure, but a full year in dueling club, apparently, he nearly as high ranked as herself, and he had not existed to her until weeks ago. Well, she _knew_ why she hadn’t noticed him. His blood was not fit for her boots. And she rarely sought out students she didn’t already know; she rarely watched duels that were not her own. But even so.

The sight of him, standing there across the hall in the flesh, made her bite her tongue. Why were fools always surrounded by groups of laughing, fawning people? Why did the most undeserving always seem to be the happiest? Maybe only imbeciles were afforded camaraderie.

As Bellatrix noticed Tonks, he noticed her. He attempted a friendly nod, but it was ruined by the uncertainty in his eyes. Bellatrix did not nod back.

“Where are the rest?” she asked, impatient for somewhere else to direct her focus. But before Macnair had even answered, she could see Nott, Evan, and Rodolphus loitering where the Slytherin table normally stood.

The dueling had already begun, so she approached them amid the noise of Eleanora Greengrass losing spectacularly to a Gryffindor fourth year that Bellatrix only knew by sight and called “Mole Face,” in her head, for obvious reasons. Greengrass was hardly the best Slytherin had to offer.

Evan seemed recovered since the morning, Rodolphus offered a small smile of greeting, and Nott, ever chipper, wiggled his fingers.

“Sorry to bet against you, Black,” he grinned. “I have complete faith in your dueling prowess, especially against current competition, but variety is the spice of life.”

Macnair snorted. “Wasn’t the spice of life for me.”

“Well, now see, if I win,” replied Nott cheerily, “it will prove me the better gambler. Empirically. Which is worth it, in my book.”

If any of the other boys observed anything different about her, they gave no indication, though Lestrange seemed to study her for a second longer than the others.

Evan murmured something in Nott’s ear, raising a laugh, and then Macnair and Nott began to bicker amicably, driving distance between the three boys and Bellatrix, who stayed standing beside Lestrange.

“Missed you at dinner,” he said.

Would everyone chastise her each time she skipped a meal?

“I had Flint nick me something from the kitchens,” she replied coldly. “She owes me a favor.”

“You got food, then? I was going to offer to nick you something myself if you hadn’t.”

“That’s what I’ve just said,” Bellatrix snapped. She had eaten plenty, though rather depressingly alone in her dormitory, her helpings of steak, potatoes, and rolls spread before her on the emerald bedspread like the world’s glummest picnic.

He shrugged, nonplussed by her irritation. “Might fancy pudding later, if you’ve a mind. Before our meeting,” he clarified.

“We shall see,” said Bellatrix, wondering idly if the rush of sugar would diminish the rush of fury.

Rodolphus massaged his neck. “I might be getting ill,” he said in his same casual tone, so practiced it was almost expressionless.

“You?” Bellatrix looked away from the final blows Mole Face was striking against Greengrass. Lestrange looked well, even better than normal. “You look fine.” A deep, bitter chuckle pressed through her throat. “I imagine _I_ look a wreck though. Not that I care. But I feel so foul I might actually have to work not to lose this bloody duel.”

“You won’t have to work very hard,” countered Rodolphus. “You would have to be at death’s door to lose a match.”

A volley of cheering rang out, and Bones’s booming pronouncement officially awarded the bout to Mole Face.

Three matches to go before her own.

“You are right of course,” Bellatrix said over the cheers. She was oddly flattered. She had also never seen the point in false modesty. “But you would laugh, Lestrange, if you knew the foul day I have had.” Though she was speaking to him, she continued to watch the dueling floor. The words came easier that way.

“We had good news this morning,” he offered.

“Good news, but such events draw the stupidest reactions from other people.”

Lestrange expelled a puff of air that might have been a laugh. “Are you really surprised to learn that other people are fools?”

“Some people—” she began heatedly, and then broke off.

Easy as breathing, Lestrange had managed to draw unrepeatable things from her.

And with dawning awareness, Bellatrix realized that it had been entirely intentional. And furthermore, she was not irritated, but rather _warmed_. How queer.

Had his blankness, which she had long taken as proof of his thick-headedness, _always_ been careful trepidation? Bellatrix wondered if she should give Rod more credit.

He jutted his head towards the floor. “This bout will be over in a second,” he predicted. He did not draw attention to the fact she had just splintered off, conspicuously, in the middle of a sentence.

Bellatrix gratefully accepted the segue.

The bout was, indeed, over in a second. With an ill-considered show of bravado, Fabian Prewett fiddled his way out of his Ravenclaw opponent’s immobilizing hex and won. The Hall burst into applause, and Prewett gave a cocky wave.

“He left his guard totally open,” scoffed Bellatrix. Rod grunted his assent. Slytherins to their cores, the thoughtless, brawny style suited neither of them.

The next bout was over in two seconds, when two Hufflepuffs sabotaged their own match by giggling too much, and then hit each other with joint tickling charms, intensifying the giggling. Bellatrix watched Rod roll his eyes.

The penultimate match seemed to drag on, as glacially slow as spring thaw.

Never before had Bellatrix gotten dueling nerves. But, for some reason, the closer her match came, the more her fingers seemed too feathery to properly grip her wand.

If she had been able to stomach the sight of her opponent, she would have seen him, tense and beseeching. She would have seen him frantically trying to signal her, trying to catch her eye, trying to communicate something. But Bellatrix had made up her mind not to see him. And rarely was her purpose shaken. So—studiously, scrupulously—she noticed none of it.

And then, it was time for Bellatrix’s duel.

Bones blew her whistle. “Next: Black versus Tonks. Final match.”

The chattering students began to quiet, looking up with eager jostling toward this final spectacle.

 “Do me a favor and lose,” said Nott, with a companionable wink. Macnair threw an elbow at him and made a gesture like shaking a coin purse.

“Good luck,” smirked Evan.

Rodolphus merely nodded.

Not one of them understood.

Bellatrix ascended the wooden floor.

Across from her, the traitor did the same. One of his socks, visible beneath his robes, was rolled higher than the other. She stared at that left sock. She couldn’t seem to formulate a full thought.

“The rules of the duel are as follows,” recited Bones, standing between them.

Celestial shapes stood out against the shining wood of the floor, like a brand. She had never noticed them before. Bellatrix wondered, like a strange, distant echo, where they stored the dueling floor the other six days of the week.

“Dueling will be to incapacitate or disarm only. Stunning is prohibited.” Bones’s expression was steely as she glanced from Bellatrix, to her opponent, back to Bellatrix. “No spells that cause injury, disfigurement, or pain.”

The phrase tripped something. Memories, faint and flickering, of a moth, crippling under her wand, spasmed through her mind.

“No spells with permanent effects. No unsportsmanlike conduct. The match will be concluded when an opponent is rendered incapable of striking back, signaled by my whistle.”

Bones stepped from the floor.

“Bow to your opponent.”

As if pulled by puppet strings, Bellatrix bent. The taste of ash was thick on her tongue.

When she rose, Tonks made a face. It might have been the beginning of a sentence, his mouth forming a word. It might have been something else.

The cry of the whistle shrilled. And something broke.

It was _fury_. Like a blinding, lacerating gash, heat eviscerated her tendons. It was fury stronger, stronger than she had ever felt before. It overpowered.

It must have been waiting to overtake her, kept barely at bay. Suddenly, it was everything. She felt it in the space between her fingers, in the span of flesh on the back of her neck, in molten tightness of her throat, in her death grip on the wand. A monster lived inside her. The monster had been given a voice.

Her wand slashed. She hadn’t thought of a spell, but something lashed out. Something pushed the Mudblood backward, so he almost toppled from the back of the dueling floor.

The crowd gasped—but he regained his footing.

Tonks’s wand twisted.

Bellatrix ripped through his attempted disarming spell with a partial shield and sent three stinging jinxes—

Bones said something, maybe invoking a penalty, but it was lost in the crowd and the fury and the fight.

One jinx soared wide, flaying the side of a window. One nicked below his ear, fluttering his hair. The final, he repelled. It ricocheted back to her, so quickly she had to duck rather that defend.

Mid-crouch, she sprung.

“ _Confringo_!”

Noise like a gunshot accompanied the blast. It tore through the air, and Tonks leapt to the side. His eyes were wide. His mouth was open. He implored.

She sent another blasting spell, this time nonverbal, and the edge of Tonks’s robes caught fire. She wanted to break him. She wanted to break his imploring face.

“ _Expelliarmus_!” He spun to the left to avoid her knee-reversing hex as he shouted, flicking his wand in the same pattern, again, again. “ _Expelliarmus! Expelliarmus! Expelliarmus_!”

His voice was weak and desperate.

No matter where he weaved or where he aimed, she lazily flicked the spells aside.

Her line of sight had narrowed. It was just him, just him tinged in red like the red-hot stranglehold of her jaw.

Some noise tore from Bellatrix’s throat, half-scream, half-growl, a keening shriek.  Crimson lights shot from her wand. Tonks barely got up his shield in time. Singe marks appeared on the floor where her spells had hit.

Behind the wavery surface of his Shield, Bellatrix watched a change come over Tonks. His mouth grew set, his eyes hard.

Now, they were both furious. How _delightful_.

He dashed his Shield aside and, as if testing, sent a Stunning Spell.

It skirted past her left arm. She didn’t even move, but watched the spell dissipate behind her. When she turned back to Tonks, she could feel the wild smile spread across her face.

He dragged one hand across his sweating forehead and looped his wand with the other. He had conjured a volley of shrieking birds, and with a flick, they shot towards her—

The spell took her by surprise. Bellatrix flung up her arms just in time. Claws scrabbled at her skin. Screwing her eyes while the birds screeched deafeningly all around, she managed to beat them back and protect her face.

“ _Evanesco_ ,” she choked. The birds vanished, and she peeled her eyes open.

But Tonks had taken advantage of her incapacitation and sent a binding curse. It caught her left foot before her shield was in place.

Disoriented, Bellatrix wrenched the foot confusedly for a moment. Her boot was glued to the floor, and Tonks was laughing. More spells were coming—

Bellatrix bowed her head, avoiding a Stunning spell, and pulled to the left as far as she could with her trapped foot to avoid his next nonverbal curse. The spell brushed her ribs, hot like a jet of fire.

“ _Finite—finite incantatum_ ,” she spluttered, pointing her wand at her own foot, at the same time as Tonks cried, “ _Expelliarmus_!”

His spell caused her wand to fly to the tips of her fingers, shattering her countercurse. Stretching, straining against the immobility of her foot, she just retained it—

But there was no hope now, she didn’t have time to free herself, and he was sending spell after spell, keeping her off-balance…

She tottered on the stupidly stuck foot, and her wand was still too lax in her hand. Her eyes tried to track the disorienting flashes of light she had to repel, but soon she would miss one…

Bellatrix would be beaten by a Mudblood. A Mudblood who had fucked her sister. A Mudblood who had ruined her family.

Something like a punch hit her wand arm, evoking a jab of pain: one of Tonks’s spells had made contact.

Bellatrix wished he was dead. She wished she was dead. There was nothing left to her but her hurt, she had lost track of where she was and where the pain and anger and hatred began. She wished she could obliterate him…

“ _Expelliarmus_!” cried Tonks, and this time his voice was victorious—

“ _CRUCIO_!”

When Tonks cried again, it was a cry of pain.

Time elongated. There was something hypnotic in the way his elbow jerked and the way his puckered eyes streamed. For a moment, Bellatrix knew exactly who she was. She had never been more awake in her life.

A thousand things happened at once.

He was on the ground, and her foot had come free, and the whole room seemed to have been shocked into absolute silence, except for the wounded, animal noise that was coming from Tonks.

And then a force splintered the air, and she was buffeted, the curse dissipated.

The Great Hall came back into focus, as did the sea of terrified faces staring at her.

Bellatrix remembered what she had forgotten. And she realized what she had done.

And words began to stream from her mouth.

 


	14. The Headmaster's Offer

“It was an accident,” Bellatrix babbled into the stunned silence. “I—it was an accident, I want—I—”

She didn’t know what she was saying. She didn’t know anything. She only knew that if they put her in Azkaban, she could never join Lord Voldemort. And if they interrogated her and somehow saw her thoughts and feelings, the fact that her friends had connections to the Death Eaters, the fact that she had spoken to him, the fact that she was now planning to seek him, not only would she be in trouble, but her Lord might be easier to track. She might endanger him or his mission. And that, she could never let happen.

“I swear, I have never done it before. I didn’t mean to do it. I don’t know how it happened.”

“Drop your wand, Bellatrix,” came a commanding cry. Bellatrix saw Professor Bones, pointing her own wand at Bellatrix. “Drop your wand.”

Reluctant though she was to let go of it, Bellatrix let her wand clatter to the ground. Professor Bones waved hers, and Bellatrix wondered if she was to be bound or immobilized. Instead a silver bloodhound burst forth. It cantered above the heads of the shocked students and out of the hall. A Patronus, she believed, sent to deliver a message—to the headmaster? To the Ministry?

Bellatrix heard hisses. “Someone should check on him.” “That’s a hate crime, that is.” “She meant to do it, for sure.” “I can’t believe she would…”

Ted Tonks sat up. Pale and shaken, he was looking at her, a strange wariness in his eyes. A wariness and…pity? It was as if he felt bad for  _her_. Bellatrix hated that. She hated that as she hated him. She turned away.

There was something seizing in her chest. She wished that she could turn the Cruciatus Curse on every single person looking at her. Or, she wished she could turn completely invisible and sink into the stone walls, never to be looked at again.

It seemed a moment later when the wide doors swung open. Dumbledore strolled into the hall, cutting a formidable figure, tailed by Professor McGonagall. His presence seemed to bring the room back to their senses. Chaos rang out. There was a clamor of noise—the students speaking to each other, crying, trying to tell Dumbledore what had happened—

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Bellatrix said again. She felt as though she were speaking to no one. “I didn’t, I didn’t…”

“Silence,” said Dumbledore, holding up a hand. An uneasy hush fell over the room. “Mr. Tonks, Professor McGonagall will escort you to the infirmary, where Madam Pomfrey will see you. Students, back to your dormitories. Professor,” Dumbledore said, addressing Bones, “and Bellatrix,” he turned his inscrutable, piercing gaze on her, “remain here.”

There was a shuffling as the students filed from the room, muttering to each other.

“With me, Tonks,” said Professor McGonagall, not unkindly, and the boy rose to stand. He walked from the hall at her side with one last mournful, infuriating glance towards Bellatrix.

“Professor Bones,” said Dumbledore, once the three of them were alone. “Could you illustrate for me what exactly happened?”

She nodded her head. "Certainly. We have had a roster in the club, and Mr. Tonks and Miss Black happened to be scheduled to face each other in the final match. Perhaps I should not have allowed it. It was an intense duel, to say the least, and the curses escalated past disarming or restricting.” She hesitated. “On both sides. But rather than repel Mr. Tonks’s attempted Stunning Spell with a Shield, Miss Black used an Unforgiveable Curse—the Cruciatus Curse—on her opponent. I immediately ended the match and shielded him, though Miss Black held the curse for perhaps a second, and had made no motion to release the spell by the time I intervened.”

“I see.”

There was a deep pause.

“Bellatrix,” said Dumbledore, in a quieter voice. His blue eyes were sharp enough to cut as he looked at her. “Did you mean to produce the Cruciatus Curse?”

“No,” said Bellatrix. “No.”

He seemed to be searching for something in her eyes. His unsettling focus reminded her of another person, who also seemed to be able to discern lies from eye contact alone…Though that had been an exhilarating experience, and this felt invasive.

Bellatrix remembered, she had been told, that she possessed strong natural barriers. She pushed down all the thoughts and feelings that confused her, a skill she had unconsciously practiced throughout her childhood. Dumbledore would not be allowed to piece through her mind. If he did, he would find nothing to contradict her words.

“Have you ever performed this spell before?”

“No.”

“Have you been taught to perform this spell?”

The question struck her as odd. “I have not.”

He held his attention for a moment longer. His face was as inscrutable as ever. Bellatrix felt dissected before him. She wished he would go away.

“Very well, Bellatrix,” said Dumbledore. “I believe you.”

“Headmaster,” interjected Bones. “She spoke the incantation, and I need not remind you that it is nearly impossible to produce an Unforgivable or any Dark spell ‘by accident,’ she would have to back up her incantation with intention—”

“No,” Bellatrix interrupted, perhaps rashly. She forced her demeanor and voice to stay level. “I was—overwhelmed in the heat of the moment. I had read about the spell in a textbook and heard the incantation there, and I acted instinctually when I saw my opponent’s attempted stunning spell. If by intention, you mean my survival instinct, that is perhaps true. It was an accident.” She forced herself to add, “and I regret it.”

“Still,” said Bones to Dumbledore, “even if that is true, the punishment is surely expulsion if not imprisonment. The Ministry should be notified, and Miss Black should be prevented from attaining the honors of completing school.”

“It is not something I take lightly,” said Dumbledore, still studying Bellatrix. “It is, in all ways, unacceptable. There is a reason such violent magic is outlawed. And, in these times more than ever, I am going to address it.”

He inclined his head to Bones. “Thank you, Professor. Your actions in this situation were perfect, and I, as ever, value your advice.” He laced his fingers together. “Bellatrix, come with me.”

Bellatrix hesitated, then picked her wand off the floor. Though no one had said she could, she was not about to beg their permission. It settled into her hand. Her arm was complete once more. The wand thrummed with energy.  _My wand likes the spell_ , she thought numbly as she followed Dumbledore from the Hall.

She walked behind him. He did not speak. She did not speak.

Bellatrix felt a strange pressure in her throat. Even though the corridors they walked were empty, her skin prickled like she was scrutinized from all sides. Bellatrix wanted the feelings to stop.

“Pumpkin Pasty,” Dumbledore told a nearby gargoyle. The carved beast grated across the floor, revealing a spiral staircase, which they climbed.

Bellatrix thought this must be the headmaster’s office. She had never been inside before.

Silvery robes wafting behind him, Dumbledore swept into the circular, windowed room. Lamps sprung to life at the wave of his wand. Bellatrix could now see an impressive gallery of portraits on the wall facing her. They all watched her, silently, in distrust and distain.  _Former headmistresses and headmasters._ Her eyes picked out a rendering of her ancestor, Phineas Nigellus Black. It was familiar to her; a similar portrait hung on the wall of a spare bedroom in Grimmauld Place, in which she sometimes stayed. They had spoken before. Now, his face was impassive and gently smug. The entire display reminded her, strangely, of her own family tapestry—a lineage of Heads of the school.

Below the portraits, Dumbledore sat behind a mahogany desk. He gestured to the chair before it.

“Sit,” he said.

Bellatrix sat.

Beneath her stony exterior, she rallied her energy; priming herself to protest, to fight back, to fight  _him_  if need be—anything rather than Azkaban or Ministry scrutiny. It felt like she had fallen into one of her nightmares. Dumbledore did not look angry in the typical sense of the word, but there was an intensity to his face and manner that seemed to foretell grave consequences.

So, it came as a shock when the old man asked her lightly, “Would you care for a cup of tea?

Bellatrix stared back, dumb-struck.

“Or coffee, should you prefer. I would offer you wine, but I am afraid you are still my student.”

Bellatrix did nothing.

“Come, Miss Black. There are important things we must discuss, and I often find I can face such matters better with a cup of strong tea in my hand.”

She did not wish to play the old fool’s game, whatever it was. But she wondered if the nonchalance of sipping a cup of tea would look better than her sitting and anxiously twisting her hands—which would he read as more contrite? Which suggested innocence more strongly?

Dumbledore gave her the slightest smile beneath his mustache. “I am afraid I will be drinking a cup, and you would oblige me by joining. Though, of course, I will not force you.”

“Tea, then,” blurted Bellatrix. Then added, “Thank you. Sir.”

He fixed two cups, hot enough they steamed, and added liberal amounts of cream and sugar to one. “And how do you take it?”

“Black.”

“I might have guessed,” he said gently, then handed her the cup on its saucer. “Miss Black.”

Bellatrix did not sip. She had been studying his hands intently. She remembered Veratisirm, clear and undetectable, or perhaps some other potion she had read about.

Displaying alarming perceptiveness, Dumbledore shook his head. “It is not spiked—with anything other than a little lemon, that is. Feel free to drink it, should you wish. I do not believe in controlling students through  _any_  magical means.”

Bellatrix heard the meaning of the sentence; he censured her for the curse. But, defiantly, she swallowed a large amount of the burning liquid.

“Now then,” said Dumbledore, taking a sip from his own cup, “we can begin.”

Bellatrix sat expectant, wondering what would come. Whatever she had anticipated, it was certainly not the intense, probing question of, “How are you, Bellatrix?”

Bellatrix was well versed in insults about the headmaster’s eccentricity, but she began to wonder if he was well and truly mad.

“Presently?” she asked, trying to keep the sneer from her voice. “I feel poorly, of course. I have just done something entirely by accident. I am waiting to see how grave the consequences will be.”

“Ah,” said Dumbledore. “I suppose that is to be expected, but I meant more generally. We have had some rather bad news this morning, and tragedy strikes everyone differently.” He spread his hands expressively. “Or even more generally than that. You have just completed your N.E.W.Ts, an impressive accomplishment. Our teachers report that you do very well in classes, though they say your effort and attention seem often, forgive me, somewhat lacking.”

“Will my grades make a difference in my sentence?” she asked, stiffly.

“I am afraid the conversation is slightly broader than that.” He sighed, setting his teacup back in its saucer. “I will be honest with you, Bellatrix. You have done a terrible thing. You are not the first student to produce dangerous magic, perhaps without meaning to, but in light of this current climate, and perhaps other circumstances besides, it seems even more terrible.

“But, despite your occasional lack of focus in class, I know you to be a gifted and clever student. I suspect you already know that using an Unforgivable Curse on another human is a terrible thing. Or rather, you know it is  _perceived_  as terrible. Else you would not claim in as an accident.”

Bellatrix felt her stomach clench. “You said you believed me.”

Dumbledore regarded her over his spectacles. “Believe is a somewhat tricky word. Do I believe that you, having never attempted this spell, knew the incantation, the wand movement, and could successfully produce it? I am afraid, I do not.”

“Are you going to send me to Azkaban, then?” Bellatrix could feel her cup of tea shaking in her hand.

“But,” said Dumbledore, not answering her question, “sometimes intense circumstances can draw more extreme, panicked responses than we would ever allow ourselves with a rational mind. Do I believe that you wanted, consciously, to produce that very spell in that moment? Do I believe that you really wanted to use it against Mr. Tonks? Do I think you understood the pain that cursing another human can cause? I think…that you did not.”

Bellatrix swallowed more tea. She did not know what else to do.

“If it were only about impressing upon you how serious a crime this is, we could involve the Ministry. But, as I said, I think you know how serious other people see this to be. So, then, our problem lies deeper. Either you do not morally understand the gravity of harming another person, or you just suddenly realized the gravity of harming another person. And I believe both those problems to be better solved personally.”

Bellatrix could not believe her ears. Did he truly mean that he would allow this to go totally unchecked by the Ministry? He was a fool, and she was an even better liar than she had thought. However, his words made her uncomfortable; she wished he would just believe her innocent and be done with it. Bellatrix had little desire to continue this conversation.

“What would you have me do?” she asked.

“I would have you answer me honestly: how do you feel?”

“Poorly,” she said again. She could not tell if she meant it or not. The Headmaster’s gaze made her feel poorly.

“Very well, Bellatrix.” She had the sense that he was almost disappointed in her as he tucked his interlocked fingers beneath his chin. “Then, why do you think this accident, for lack of a better word, manifested itself against Mr. Tonks?”

Bellatrix wet her lips. “Self-preservation,” she repeated.

“I remind you,” said Dumbledore softly, but with an edge to his voice, “that I am being rather generous with you, Miss Black. I am asking very little.”

She made no reply. He asked a great deal.

Dumbledore adjusted his spectacles atop his crooked nose. She suspected he was changing his tactic. “Then let us speak of something else, briefly. Do you have plans for after you leave school?”

 “Fulfilling my duties to my family,” she said, keeping her mind studiously blank.

“What would you wish to do, after your schooling?” Perhaps he noticed her tensed jaw, because he gave a gentle chuckle. “I do know the pressures families like yours put on their young wizards and witches. I would not be surprised if those pressures proved difficult for an ambitious, talented witch such as yourself.”

Bellatrix looked up at this.

“I feel inclined to remind you, that there are a great many opportunities for passionate, young wizards in the world. I believe you could excel at…curse breaking, perhaps?” A glance at the old man showed he was earnest; Bellatrix felt the insane urge to snort with laughter. She had just done something punishable by prison, and now she sat in the Headmaster’s office, being given career advice. Dumbledore continued, “Adventure, travel, excitement, studying old magic…no, not curse breaking? Well, that is just one possibility.”

He slurped his tea pensively. There was a long silence. Bellatrix clutched her cooling cup between her palms, her eyes flicking towards those of the headmasters and headmistresses—they stared back.

Dumbledore was also looking at her, once more. She had the strange thought that he was deciding whether he could trust her.

“Do you know,” he said quietly, “I myself am assembling an organization, of sorts. And I dare say we could benefit from your presence, should you wish it.”

“What…what sort of organization?” she asked, caught off-guard.

“An organization dedicated to uplifting people in these troubled times. To serving in ways the Ministry cannot. To working towards justice for all magical peoples.”

“With fighting?”

Dumbledore inclined his head. “Many things besides, but I daresay that despite our best attempts, it will come to combat as well.” He folded his hands. “Admission for you would not be entirely easy, especially in light of this recent action. But I believe, and have always believed, that forgiveness is always possible…with remorse. I meant what I said this morning; it is never too late to set a new path.”

Bellatrix’s hands tightened on her cup. “What do you know of my path?” she asked. “Who says it needs to be changed?”

Dumbledore gave a brief gesture of apology. “Only you can say that. But I do know that you are now in my office because you have caused another student profound pain. You rendered a space—that should have been one for safety, trust, and friendly competition—violent and hostile. And evaluation is always healthy. It is not always so easy to cause pain as we might think.

“You have great respect for tradition, Bellatrix,” continued Dumbledore. “You have commitment to your allegiances, you have ambition; all fine characteristics, befitting of your placement in Slytherin. But, from what I know of you, you can also be brave and thirst for action. You are also profoundly loyal, not unlike a Hufflepuff. And you are clever, not unlike a Ravenclaw. Sorting is our own adherence to legacy and tradition, a mechanism to give students close-knit communities in their time at school…but sometimes, I do worry that we should be emphasizing that which makes us similar, rather than that which makes us different.” His brow puckered; he seemed for a moment lost in his own thoughts, before his focus settled again on her. “I would be very sorry if this system has helped to convince you that you have nothing to learn from your fellows in other houses, or that there is cause to fear those you perceive as different.”

“I am in my house because I value the attributes of Slytherin the most,” said Bellatrix, twitching in her seat. “I would want to be in no other house. It has given me no fear, only pride.”

She no longer knew what Dumbledore was saying, but she grew increasingly anxious that she had somehow let something slip. Or that he guessed more than he let on.

Dumbledore sighed. “You are still young, Bellatrix. Forgive me, but I will speak openly.” He fixed her with a small, melancholy smile, far too knowing for her taste. “You would not be the first young person to be drawn by the thrall of the Dark, without realizing that Light, that goodness, that kindness, can also bring glory and greatness. It is not too late.”

Bellatrix poured the rest of her tea into her mouth. It was cold and full of dregs.

“Very well,” she said, controlling her derision as best she could. “I will take your advice. Some evaluation might do me well—to ensure that nothing so entirely  _accidental_  and beyond my control ever happens again.”

She put enough emphasis on the words to reiterate her stance. Bellatrix did not want the old man to think she had lost any ground, even with his uncomfortable conversation.

She set her empty cup decidedly on his desk, signaling that she wished to be finished.

“Just a few more things, Miss Black.” Dumbledore’s face seemed very old and very lined, and she wondered if she had exhausted him.  _Good,_ she thought.

“Forgive the rapid change of subject, but I understand that you recently left the school grounds to attend an event. I believe, a celebration of sorts for your friend Rodolphus Lestrange.”

Bellatrix’s hand tensed on her skirt. She kept her face impassive.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” asked Dumbledore. His eyes were too probing to be innocent.

“Yes,” said Bellatrix, wondering what he knew and how in Salazar’s name he had learned it. “It was a quiet and pleasant event.”

He held his focus for a moment, then turned from her.

“Eustacia,” he said, and Bellatrix realized he was addressing one of the portraits, who looked particularly disapprovingly at her, “have you checked in on Mr. Tonks in the hospital wing, as I had asked?”

“I have, Headmaster,” she answered with a curt nod. “He does well. Physically, of course, he is perfect, but they are running through the normal emotional trauma procedures. However, he maintains that he feels well. We advise a no-contact order against  _her_ for the rest of term, brief though it is.”

“An advisement I wholeheartedly endorse. You hear that, Bellatrix?” said Dumbledore, turning back to her. “You will be glad to know the recipient of your curse has sustained no lasting physical damage, and does as well as can be expected. Though, as you heard, you will not be allowed to see him for the rest of your time here.”

“Is that all?” she asked.

“Just one last thing,” said Dumbledore, very softly. “I wonder if you might…if you might apologize to Mr. Tonks.”

“I thought you said there was to be an order of no-contact.”

“I meant here,” said the Headmaster. “Sometimes, just saying the words can be helpful.”

It was humiliation in the highest. The very thought roused all the twisting, agonizing feelings in the pit of her stomach, all the feelings she wished to push down or drive out. Bellatrix longed to storm from the office, landing a jinx on the self-indulgent  headmaster before she did. Someday, she would never bow to his authority. They would meet again, and she would never dare to submit to him. But the danger of prison, of consequence, of his lingering suspicion still oppressed her. She had no choice.

“I am sorry,” she said.  _I am sorry that he is such a foul, traitorous, family-corrupting, violent, hateful, smug, lecherous Mudblood_ , she finished in her head, her blood boiling at the very thought of his thatched, hateful face.

Dumbledore sighed again, drawing an aged had across his eyes before resettling his glasses. Of course he was unsatisfied with her apology, but she refused to do any more. She did not think she could.

“My offer still stands, Bellatrix,” said Dumbledore. “Perhaps I should retract it, but I wish you to know that there are always other avenues open. It is not yet too late to turn back. If you should soon realize that you are unhappy with where you stand, I ask you to use your drive for progress rather destruction. I hope, if that ever happens, you come to me.”

His blue eyes were bright as ice.

“I will remember,” said Bellatrix. “It is fortunate, then, that I am happy with all my actions—with the exception of this recent mistake. And I mean always to use everything in my grasp for progress. Thank you for your trust in me, Headmaster. It is most…generous.”

“Oh, I do not know if I could call it trust, Bellatrix.” He peered over his spectacles. “Perhaps hope is a better word. I have always had profound hope for my students…and I find, in my old age, I must always hope that the light in people’s hearts will win over the dark.”

She wondered if he meant that as an insult, but she did not plan to stay to find out. She rose to her feet.

He stood as well. She had forgotten how tall he was.

“And, I daresay I need not add,” he said as she began to force her way from the room, “the Ministry is not nearly so merciful when dealing with Unforgivable Curses. There are graver consequences should you ever produce another…mistake…upon leaving the school grounds.”

She spit out, “Goodnight, Sir.”

“Goodnight, Miss Black.”

As she strode away from his office, she saw the curious look on Phineas Nigellus Black’s painted face—and then she was into the curved stairwell and away from the Headmaster’s eyes.

Bellatrix practically ran away from his office. 

When she felt herself at a safe distance, she sighed, allowing all the tension to bleed from her coiled limbs.

With that kind of leadership, it was no wonder her school experience had been so miserable. Before now, the Headmaster had never troubled to get to know her. Where had he been when her father had been taken ill? Where had he been at her true career consultations, where she had been forced to repeat that, if she was not granted inheritance, she would be “attending to her family?” When she had lost the title of heir? Where had he been when she had been greeted with a volley of whispers and distrustful stares—from the Mudbloods, from the Gryffindors, from almost everyone—upon her first steps inside the castle? When she had sat alone in the Great Hall, ignoring the mutters, if her chosen group or her sisters ( _sister_ , now, she corrected herself) were occupied?

He had been nowhere. Dumbledore had always hated her just as she hated him. And now he tried to address her like some self-contented grandfather, perhaps for the sake of indulging his own ego or conscience.

Well, she would not stand for  _that_.

_Someday, I will turn my curse on him and see how superior he can be. I will slap the prim glasses from his crooked face. I will burn his school to the ground._

Though it accomplished nothing, the unspoken, vengeful torrent made her feel better.

Dumbledore must know, somehow, that the Dark Lord had attended Lestrange event. But what were all those half-concealed queries about her being taught the Dark Arts? Apparently, the old man could not even grant her the suspicion that she had learned it all herself.

Why did he not understand that sometimes destruction was  _necessary_ for progress?

The rawest, most flayed wound was one she hardly dared probe. But before she could divert herself, she tried to remember the moment her curse had flown. Was it intentional? Did she want to? Did she regret it? The feelings and questions twisted in a sweltering mess.

She could not think about any of the rest, but Tonks deserved it, she was sure. Of that she was sure, and she was strong enough to produce the curse on a human. Those were the two things to which she would return.


	15. Resistance

If she could only get to the common room, Bellatrix thought as she swung around a corner to avoid three jabbering first-years, she could wait out everyone’s suspicions. The whispers of “Cruciatus Curse” and her name had been snaking through the halls at an almost alarming pace, it seemed, while she had been walled up in Dumbledore’s study. Gossip had always held an infernally good market in the dry halls of Hogwarts, populated by its brood of anxious children. Bellatrix wasn’t afraid of the first-years, but she didn’t trust her temper to stay contained. And the last thing she needed was another uncontrolled burst of rage.

In the common room, she repeated to herself, her group would assemble, and they would understand. Perhaps they would be impressed. The thought elicited a smile. Surely, too, the Dark Lord would be impressed. Unless he thought her lack of control an ill recommendation…

She could not worry about it now. Her goal was as narrow as getting to the common room. Safety, support, and clarity waited inside.

A blessedly empty dungeon corridor spanned before her. The solitary ivy-wrought door at the end stood out like a beacon. Bellatrix quickened her pace towards it and felt herself exhale as she stepped inside—

And she realized she had stepped into a trap.

No, not a trap, an _ambush_.

Silhouetted against a blazing fire sat the person Bellatrix least wanted to see. In a stab of desperate irony, she reflected that her sister had never before seemed to be in the common room when Bellatrix had wanted her to be there.

Life was a sweetly torturous game.

The hunched, brown-haired figure turned.

Andromeda had been crying. Even at a distance, even painted in streaks of amber and orange from the firelight, Bellatrix could tell that much. Her round face was blotched; the rolls beneath her eyes bloated. Bellatrix did not know what to say.

She did not have to know. The traitor spoke first.

“You would not believe what they are saying.” A strangely hallow cadence deadened Andromeda’s voice. The unplaceable tone was almost worse than the fury Bellatrix had anticipated.

Andromeda lifted her chin, still managing to look accusatory in spite of her puffy skin and red eyes. “They are saying that you tortured him with an Unforgivable Curse.”

Bellatrix did not answer.

“A week ago,” continued Andromeda, “I would have said it was impossible. I would have defended you. Now, I believe them.”

It was then that Bellatrix identified the tone of her sister’s voice: resignation. Sparks leapt in the fire.

“That’s right,” said Bellatrix. “You should believe them. I did.”

Andromeda did not move, but disgust welled through her features. “What has become of you, Bella?”

 “ _What has become of me_?” If Bellatrix thought all her rage had been spent, she had been mistaken. It was a bottomless well, a ceaseless beating. It reanimated itself against Andromeda. “You have _ruined_ us!”

Andromeda was shaking her head. “I don’t know you anymore.”

“I do not know _you_! Andromeda, our whole legacy is on the line. You would sacrifice all of that for some hateful—”

“I don’t care about history or legacy, or any of that. It’s nothing but a justification for bigotry.”

“ _My_ life is on the line.” Bellatrix’s throat constricted perilously. “And Cissy’s. I thought magic was worth something to you, I thought the family was worth something to you.”

Andromeda glanced around, as if looking for her next attack among the emerald armchairs.

“I thought,” said Bellatrix, “that _I_ was worth something to you.”

“This isn’t about the family.”

“What?” Already planning her next retort, Bellatrix did not understand Andromeda’s meaning.

Andromeda looked up, back at Bellatrix. “This is not about the family,” she repeated.

“Of course it is,” spat Bellatrix. “The family and everything else.”

Andromeda shook her head. “No, Bella.” Her face was maddeningly, maddeningly full of conviction. “This is all about you.”

A desire to retaliate festered, but Bellatrix had no idea what Andromeda was trying to say—of course Andromeda knew it and was holding her point hostage, protected from rebuttal. Bellatrix was forced to wait for her to elaborate.

Andromeda took her sweet time. “You do not care a whit about the family.”

That was markedly untrue, and Bellatrix opened her mouth, disagreement hot on her tongue when Andromeda held up a hand. The gesture was so composed that Bellatrix found herself falling silent, though from obedience or outrage she could not tell.

“You care about the family to the extent that it serves _you_. But to you, the family is just something that elevates your own self-image. It’s your own claim to nobility. You don’t care about Orion or our parents or their respect or any of it. I’ve heard you disparage even the things you’re now claiming to champion—if the legacy is respecting rules, you don’t care about that either.”

This struck hard enough that it pushed Bellatrix’s words back down her throat.

“Family,” Andromeda continued in a tone of wounded steel, “is about relationships and people and love. So this is not about family.”

Bellatrix gnawed on the inside of her cheek. “No, it is not about any of that—it is, it is about you betraying the things I thought we stood for!” A new revelation, enthralling and horrifying, occurred to her. “How long have you gone behind everyone’s back? When you first started studying in the library? When you first started spending all your time writing letters? The day—the day Narcissa was attacked by that Mudblood, you were _writing_ him! You were fraternizing with a Mudblood of your own!”

“You—you shut up!” Andromeda’s composure was not as unshakable as it had first seemed. Bellatrix watched it crumble with dark glee.

“If you think that you are so innocent, then why have you been hiding?”

“Because I knew that _this_ would happen!” cried Andromeda. “But I thought, maybe with time, you could understand—”

“You thought wrong.”

Andromeda gave a desperate laugh. “You might have understood,” she said. “You might have, but something has happened to you, and you have changed, and that’s why this is all about you.” Andromeda eyes coursing over Bellatrix’s entire form, probing. “Or, you’ve been this all along, and I didn’t see it until now. And I don’t know which is worse.”

In a chaotic, sweeping motion, Bellatrix pushed her hair from her face and swatted something from her eyes.

“If you put all this behind you,” she said, fixing her stare on Andromeda, who was still drawn tightly into her chair, “I will not tell mother or Walburga. I will try my best to forget all about this, if you start behaving the way you should. If you swear to put your support on the proper side of the war, we can leave this fight here.”

At the last few words, something rose in Andromeda’s face, like milk curdling. “I knew it,” she said, and horror rankled her voice. “I _knew_ it. Oh Bella, you can’t do it. You can’t.”

“I can do whatever I please.”

“Listen to me, Bella—

“I told you to _stop calling me that._ ”

Bella was a girl who was prized by her father and loved by her sisters. She was also a fierce, impish, reckless warrior, a prospect of the Dark Lord. She was not a girl who associated with muggle-lovers and mourned traitors. In Andromeda’s mouth, the first two identities were obliterated and the third was vice-like.

Andromeda seemed to be fighting for control. “I have heard rumors, of you, your friends—but listen to me. He is just a man, you have never wanted to take orders from a man, he’s doing terrible things, horrible, _horrible_ things, and you have to know that—”

“Someday,” said Bellatrix, “I will tell you things I have done, and you will weep in fear and awe.”

“You’re just the same,” whispered Andromeda. She had begun to cry afresh. “You’re a bully, Bella. You hate yourself, so you think you have to hate everyone else. You’re so desperate to be extraordinary that you’re ready to make yourself a villain in your own life. You could be so good.”

“There’s no such thing as good,” snarled Bellatrix.

She did not, could not, believe in _good_ and _evil_. She did not believe in _light_ and _dark_ , or any other terms people used to describe a split that seemed less like a split and more like a yawning stretch of grey, puddled with shadows. There was power and those who were strong enough to take it in their own hungry hands. And there were those controlled by fear—fear of government, fear of authority, fear of death, fear of some ridiculous divine retribution—too afraid to lay their claim on the world. Bellatrix would not live to see herself become the latter. “I am fighting for myself and my family and magic. And _that_ is whatever you call good.”

“You’re fighting for a psychopathic terrorist and yourself.”

“Does Narcissa know of your treachery?” shot Bellatrix.

The startled, naked dismay in Andromeda's face answered the question.

Bellatrix’s lips tightened in a smile. “Perhaps you should stop attacking me and think on yourself. If you think it’s only me who will not be forgiving, you are underestimating my sister.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

Bellatrix’s smile expanded into a grin. “I will see you _eviscerated_ from my family.”

“You’re a coward,” said Andromeda.

Bellatrix had thought she was beyond the capacity of being wounded by this traitor, but the words stabbed, as real as any physical pain. “Don’t say that to me.”

“You disgust me,” spat Andromeda, her eyes welling over. “I _hate_ you.”

“DON’T SPEAK TO ME!”

“You’re _weak._ ”

It happened too fast for thought, but suddenly her hands were on her wand and her wand was crackling, and the words were on her tongue—

“Really, Bella? You would curse you own sister?”

It would have meant something different had Andromeda looked shocked, horrified, _anything_ , but all that seemed behind her now. She was just sitting, irritatingly vulnerable and calm. It was as if she knew, they both knew, that they were sisters no longer.

But, for whatever reason, Bellatrix lowered her wand. She ran down the staircase to her dormitory. She ran away. Still, she couldn’t help but see where Andromeda stayed, resigned and alone, curled in the chair, her wet eyes mirroring the blaze of fire.

* * *

 

As Rodolphus said to her between bites of thieved lemon custard, Bellatrix did have a way of plowing through people’s resistance.

_Resistance._

The word hung on her mind. She and her companions, her friends, they resisted the corrupted regime of the Ministry and the hostile proletariat. Yet Andromeda resisted her. Perhaps the world was an endless transaction of resistance, of deadlock, of people blocking and pushing one another, where the only goal was to avoid being swayed. If that was the case, Bellatrix could compliment herself for staying her course.

There was something indomitably thrilling about resistance, she thought, gazing around at the shadowy faces assembled before her. Though the abandoned common room by night had become familiar to her, there had not found themselves there.

Rodolphus had also been quick to note that Bellatrix had a gift for picking conspicuous times and places to lose her temper. She did not disagree. She had not even troubled to consider that her row with Andromeda might have been observed, but of course it had. The common room in late evening was never deplete of listening ears. So the hive of cunning Slytherins, already the sight for a polarizing and conspicuous—and rather dramatic—fight, was no longer a suitable place to discuss avowing support to the dangerous side of the war.

It turned out that a defunct 6th floor bathroom was.

“You have to swear.”

Rodolphus’s husky whisper crackled with verboten intrigue. The sound caught the barest echo from the ceramic sinks and tiled floors. The group glanced at each other. It was the usual collection: Nott, Macnair, Evan, and Bellatrix, though they were accompanied by Rodolphus’s younger brother Rabastan and, unavoidably, Lucius Malfoy.

“What do you mean, swear?” asked Nott, his smile giving way to something far less certain.

“This isn’t a game,” scoffed Macnair. “I don’t need to swear like a _child_.”

Rodolphus quelled him with a look. “The Dark Lord will make you swear in far more permanent ways.”

Macnair’s eyes widened; Bellatrix felt the rush of an involuntary smile. She could still taste the melting, cloying tang of lemon custard on her tongue, courtesy of Rodolphus’s theft. He looked well tonight. Except for the gleam of the moon on the white sinks and dingy tile, the room was lost in darkness. His features slipped out of it like he was wearing a cowl. It became him. He looked like he belonged.

“Swear you will repeat nothing I tell you tonight.”

The group assented.

Rodolphus seemed satisfied. “I am allowed to tell you any of this,” he said, “because of a mission. Finding new recruits.”

Bellatrix was not oblivious to the hint of pride that puffed him as he said so.

“I would have waited until school ended, but Bellatrix told me we should do so now, caution be damned.” He teased her with a flicker of a smile. “So here is what you need to know.”

They collectively leaned in. Rodolphus’s voice dropped even lower, skirting through the darkness.

“He is using Dolohov’s manor as a headquarters. A few more elite members stay in the manor or spend a fair amount of time there. The others come for scheduled weekly meetings, or when he calls them.”

“How does he call them?” asked Evan.

Bellatrix had the same question. She had difficulty imagining the Dark Lord knotting his correspondences to the legs of owls or poking his head into a fire.

Irritatingly, it was Malfoy that answered, rather than Lestrange.

He extended a scrawny left arm and shook his robed sleeve like a pretentious parlor magician.

The bait was too great for Bellatrix to resist. “Am I supposed be impressed?” she asked, regarding his gesture with mocking skepticism.

Lucius ignored her and pulled up his sleeve.

She could not help but gasp. Branded into his arm was the same symbol the newspaper had shown above Diagon Alley. It was as red and beautiful as rust or blood.

“He gave that to you?” she asked. She turned to Lestrange. “Have you got one?”

He gave a single, irritated shake of his head. “No, not yet.”

That was reassuring, at least.

“I needed one for _my_ mission,” inflected Lucius, as arrogant as a peacock.

“How does it work?” asked Nott. The answer seemed to come to him before anyone could respond. “Some form of Protean Charm,” he said, gaining excitement. “So he would send a signal through another one of the brands—But a modification—does it…does it hurt?” Lucius’s silence was as good as confirmation. Nott shook his head. “That’s wickedly clever. And Dark.”

 “Yes, well, he _is_ the Dark Lord,” drawled Lucius.

Rodolphus cleared his throat. “So that’s how he lets fully initiated members know he wants them. _Neither_ of us is a fully initiated member.”

Bellatrix smirked at Lucius’s sulky silence.

“Alright then.” Macnair kneaded his lips against one another. “How do we—how do we, you know…”

“How do we join?” Bellatrix cut in.

“I will pass along your names,” said Rodolphus. “And then, the Dark Lord will find a way to let you know when he needs your services.”

“We just wait?” It was not the answer she had hoped for. “We wait and just trust you will make arrangements?”

“I _will_ make arrangements,” said Lestrange.

Bellatrix tapped her wand against her leg, impatient, and accidentally caused a jet of hot water to spurt from the tip

“But you and Malfoy are already in. And your father can see Rab safely in as well. And Evan has his father. But what about the rest of us?”

“You _wait_ , Bellatrix,” smirked Lucius. “Have you not listened to what was just said?”

The thought of waiting in her house, near her father, near her Uncle Orion, near Andromeda, was abhorrent. She had thought that perhaps they would all set out that very night to pledge themselves. The delay was a crushing prospect.

“What if I contacted my Uncle Rosier myself and secured my and Evan’s membership through him?”

Evan looked uncomfortable to be implicated.

“This is what I was told to do,” said Lestrange, now speaking specifically to her. His jaw was tight. “Dole out the information I have told you, to trustworthy people, when it’s safe to do so, after the war was declared. Then pass along your names. Nothing more.” He spoke more softly: “Do you really want to gamble with the Dark Lord’s instructions, Bellatrix?”

Bellatrix ground her teeth together. She did not. And she was once again in the familiar place of feeling trapped and feeling resigned to waiting.

“Fine, then.”

“Is there…is there anything else?” asked Rabastan. It was the first time he had spoken. Bellatrix could still not tell how much he had known before this conversation.

She wondered if it was a strategy, inadvertently affecting even these junior members she knew: conceal all information and reveal nothing. If her suspicion was correct, this strategy would effectively prevent any internal treachery, and would keep the group protected from opposition trying to infiltrate. As it was now proving an obstacle to her, as well. Nevertheless, she had to admire her Lord’s cunning.

“That is all I know,” replied Rodolphus.

The group disbanded and sneaked back to the--mercifully empty--common room. One by one, with murmured plans and the jokes, others trooped down to their bedrooms.

Bellatrix did not. Neither, it so happened, did Rodolphus. She did not plan it; she wondered if her irritation at him in some way enabled it. Bellatrix was getting better and better at throwing caution to the winds.

What ensued was itself a kind of resistance, the friction two bodies can willfully produce, though neither of them resisted. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Bellatrix found herself thinking that, despite everything else, darkness was a remarkable aphrodisiac.


	16. Ember and Ash

Rain hissed against the shuttered window of the room, and Narcissa’s whisper crawled along Bellatrix’s neck. “You can’t mean to go through with it.”

Like a dog raising its hackles, Bellatrix hunched her shoulders away from the feel of her sister’s breath. “You can’t mean to defend a traitor,” she replied.

They had been having this argument since Bellatrix had told Narcissa of Andromeda’s betrayal on the train.

Though she kept her back turned, Bellatrix could see Narcissa’s pained reflection in the mirror above the armoire. This guest room of Grimmauld Place, coopted as their dressing room, had walls papered in a murky green, pattered with archaic designs. Against the wallpaper, Narcissa looked like some strange dryad-like creature, too white and cold for the dimness of her surroundings.

“Family loyalty,” she said after a pause. “She is still our sister. She might find her way back to us.”

Bellatrix swept her wand along her collarbone; a string of garnets appeared in its wake above the neckline of her dress robes. She had opted for her burgundy tonight. Though the family felt more fractured than it ever had before, customs were still to be abided. The obstinate cling to tradition despite inner turmoil was, itself, a custom. Dinner at the patriarch’s house, however routine an occurrence, meant formality and proper attire. It meant keeping up appearances. And where appearances were concerned, Bellatrix had always enjoyed a touch of the theatrical.

“She is no longer our sister. You cannot invoke ‘family loyalty’ for someone who is not part of the family.”

“But—”

Bellatrix gripped Cissy’s slender wrist. “This is our duty.”

 “There must be another way—sometime more private at least.” Narcissa tried to extricate herself from the pierce of Bellatrix’s nails, and failed. “We shouldn’t have to make a scene.”

Bellatrix didn’t answer.

She was decided. And though she would not have said so to Cissy, she was proving something—to the cause, or her family, or herself, perhaps. She did not know. She merely knew it had to be carried out this way.

There was a soft tap on the door.

“Dinner is ready, missus,” pipped a house-elf’s voice.

Bellatrix retracted her hand. “Come,” she said. “It is time.”

Downstairs, the dining table floated in a sea of gloom. Indistinguishable shadows of candles fluttered around it like restless fingers, and light caught on the laden surface of china, wine bottles, tureens, and a roast pheasant, macrabe in its intactness.

Seated behind the pheasant, Walburga’s beady eyes peered over the crinkled flesh to scrutinize her family assembling at the table.

Assuming her seat, Narcissa paid the expected compliment on the meal to Walburga. Walburga had never raised a finger to cook in her life, though she had raised plenty of hands to encourage—or batter—house-elves to their cooking. Nonetheless, she received the pleasantry with a self-satisfied nod. Bellatrix chose to forgo this custom.

Approaching from the opposite hallway, Druella folded into her chair. Nothing in her manner suggested distress. Nothing in her manner suggested much of anything, in fact.

At her left, Regulus squirmed. He was dwarfed by his high-backed seat, precociously trying to look dignified.

Cygnus, of course, would not be joining this family affair.

When Orion descended the staircase, his mouth tensed at the sight of the two remaining empty chairs.

“Where is that dratted boy?” he asked the room at large, by way of greeting.

 “In his room, I expect,” muttered Bellatrix.

Orion ignored her. “Is he with your daughter?” This was directed to Druella, who looked up sleepily as if his voice reached her from distance.

“I believe so.”

Orion’s nostrils flared.

Walburga snapped her fingers and a house-elf, previously indistinguishable from a potted plant, scurried into view.

“Call my son and niece for dinner,” she spat. The elf bowed and retreated from the dining room.

No one spoke until the final two figures emerged on the stairs.

Sirius led. He had grown since Bellatrix had last seen him: though a child, he must have been nearing Narcissa’s height. His postured was rounded, a peculiar kind of awkwardness and obstinance mingled in his sloped gait. Nonetheless, reluctant and in the thralls of adolescence, the Black good breeding had spared none of its grace on his maturing features. Bellatrix glumly reflected that he might be handsome someday.

Andromeda hunkered in her younger cousin’s shadow, as though trying to skirt into the dining room entirely unnoticed. Noting the redness of her eyes, Bellatrix bolstered herself. Tonight, treachery would have its recompence.

Orion did not trouble to look at his son as he rebuked him with a single, cold: “Late.”

Mouth an immutable line, Sirius scuffed his eyes with his fist and dropped moodily into a chair. Andromeda followed suit, saying nothing.

Knife and fork suspended, Orion held stillness until he felt he had drawn enough attention to begin the meal. First bites were consumed without conversation. Walburga’s wet jaws clacked as she chewed her food.

Narcissa glanced furtively at Bellatrix. Bellatrix watched Andromeda. Her body bespoke guilt: downcast face, rounded spine, nervous hands. But Bellatrix must wait.

It took Orion a full five minutes to begin his selected topic for discussion. This evening, he chose Bellatrix’s future, though in a typically circuitous way of introduction.

“The completion of schooling,” he said, knife severing the neck of the pheasant, “is when a witch knows it is time to put foolishness aside.”

Retorts buzzed through Bellatrix’s head.

Instead she answered: “I believe, Uncle, that a witch would have done well to forswear foolishness before that point.”

“Never is foolishness advisable,” agreed Walburga.

Druella paused from her goblet. “Quite,” she murmured, before resuming her apparent quest to finish the drink before the first course.

 “Perhaps,” Orion nodded, “a witch of breeding should never partake in foolish behaviors—perhaps, for her, mistakes are never excusable.”

Bellatrix clinked her fork against her plate. “I suppose it depends on how one defines foolishness.”

Orion liked debates, especially pedantic debates, especially pedantic debates in which he assumed he had the upper hand.

Stroking his snowy goatee, he took the bait. “And how would you define it, Bellatrix?”

 “Many things construe foolish behavior,” she said. “Liaising with unsavory people is certainly among them.”

“What is _liase_?” asked Regulus, pivoting from Bellatrix to his father.

Walburga hushed him.

The table observed the brewing debate. Druella refilled her glass, while Narcissa ducked behind a long draught of water. Sirius stabbed his pheasant; Andromeda scooted hers across her plate.

“Ah,” said Orion. “But that begs the question, how _you_ would define ‘unsavory people,’ Bellatrix.”

Bellatrix smiled at her uncle. “Mudbloods, of course.”

Orion’s jaw twitched—perhaps he suspected she would rehash their earlier argument, about the Mudblood man who had accosted Narcissa in the garden.

At their table, however, in this noble and ancient House, such a sentence was indisputable.

“That,” resolved her uncle, “goes without saying.”

 “It _should_ go without saying,” Bellatrix amended, her smile unfaltering.

Tense as a rabbit cornered by a fox, Andromeda looked up from her plate.

“In this house it does.” Walburga punctuated the end of her sentence by clapping her cup onto the table.

“Not entirely.”

Her aunt frowned and leaned forward. “What’s that, Bellatrix?  What did you say?”

 “Some people could use reminders, it seems,” she said softly, keeping her focus on the girl shrinking across from her.

Andromeda tried to spoon herself a bite of food. Her hand shook.

Orion looked between the sisters. Something about Bellatrix’s stare must have been telling, for his eyes narrowed on Andromeda.

“What have you done, my girl?”

The spoon tumbled from Andromeda’s grasp, clattering on the china.

The bone in the pheasant wing Orion had been sawing snapped. His jaw bunched like a clock about to spring. “ _WHAT HAVE YOU DONE_?”

The strangest details always stood out to her in moments like these, thought Bellatrix—objects were magnified, as if they had not been real before the plunging instant where she realized how irrevocable life was. Threads of gold glinted against the rubescent fabric of the table cloth. A clock shuddered on an end table. And Andromeda was wearing pale yellow robes; Bellatrix wondered where she had come by them.

Bellatrix stood.

The room seemed to rise with her, suspended. A ragged thought crossed her mind: the tablecloth and clock and Andromeda’s robes anticipated her next move with bated breath.

“She has consorted with a Mudblood,” Bellatrix spoke into the expectant room. “She has done it openly and shamelessly, and she has disgraced us all.”

The ice splintered and fractured. The thread snapped. Everything waltzed into the background, forgotten, except the girl with brown hair in yellow robes.

Cacophony enveloped the dining room. Orion bellowed. Walburga overturned a dish. Something choked from Narcrissa’s lips and Regulus piped questions that no one heard and Sirius barked words indignantly and Druella began to cry into her wine.

Bellatrix stayed standing. She could only think that once, she had taught Andromeda how to paint—they had been children, and it was a discarded set of pastels, and how messy they had gotten, smeared in reds and blues and laughing like banshees. Where had everything gone so wrong?

It was Walburga’s harsh caw that re-assumed order.

“You, girl,” she said to the shrinking Andromeda, “will be cast out. You are no longer welcome in this house. You are no longer a part of this family. You are a traitor. Do you know what happens to traitors?”

Andromeda did not cry. Her frozen limbs resolved into something less like prey and more like strength, and when she spoke her voice was quiet but calm.

“They are burned from the family tree.”

For some inconceivable reason, Bellatrix felt a smart of older sisterly pride before the feeling extinguished as quickly and perplexingly as it had come.

“That’s right,” said Walburga with a sickly grin. “They are _burned_.”

And they were on the move.

Limber, like a dancer, Walburga cracked her neck and Disapperated. Orion followed, then Druella, who swayed confusedly on the spot for a moment, unable to look at any of her children.

The young ones were left—those who could not Apparate and Bellatrix and Andromeda, who held as if rooted to the ground.

Sirius lurched to his feet and bounded up the stairs, Regulus tumbling, uncoordinated, on his heels. Narcissa pushed from the table uneasily but looked back—a small, involuntary movement. Her face was unreadable.

She hurried from the room.

Andromeda stayed. The seating arrangement had been prophetic, and she and Bellatrix were directly across from one another. They were always opposite. They were mirrored, carnival-like distorted reflections of the other. Rivals, allies, enemies—sisters, once.

Something burned in Andromeda’s face. Bellatrix wondered if she looked into an expression of her sister’s hatred, so potent she could have melted in it, but a queer look bloomed from within Andromeda’s burning cheeks. It was a sibylline expression. It could have even been a smile, though it was hard as obsidian.

 “You wouldn’t want to miss the payoff for your grand show,” whispered Andromeda, still meeting Bellatrix’s eyes with blistering intensity. And she turned, the yellow fabric moving like candle-flame, and Bellatrix followed into the crushing darkness.

She never doubted where they were going.

The upstairs drawing room materialized. Walburga, Orion, and Druella formed a triangle before the tapestry. In her youth, Bellatrix had imagined that a moment of burning the tapestry would look profound and ritualistic, but the collection of adults was too sudden and disjointed to feel so.

Sirius burst into the room, puffing and out of breath, apathy transformed to alarm. Regulus, looking confused, followed. Narcissa hesitated behind them.

Andromeda appeared. What would have happened if the traitor had chosen not to Apparate into the drawing room, if she had stayed sitting at the table, perhaps sipping her wine? Or if she had calmly exited the house, not compelled to witness.

But this was Andromeda, and Andromeda was who she was, and so there was never really a choice at all. The mess—all of it, in its entirety—might have been inevitable from the moment she gulped in her first, mewing breath and Bellatrix was shown the baby in a bundle and notified she had a sister.

Walburga removed her wand, a short, thick instrument, and leveled it at the tapestry. Everyone else watched as if dumb. Within the canvas, the threads and names traced their familiar patterns.

A name at the bottom left wrapped in on itself again and again, like a snake or a collapsing star. _Bellatrix Black. Bellatrix Black Bellatrix Black_

How many times had Bellatrix regarded that collection of letters, worshipful, thinking that their presence on this tapestry promised glory—thinking that stirrings of the future slinked within her own name? _Too many times_ , she answered herself.

Squinting at it now, Bellatrix furiously tried to re-experience her conviction of the tapestry’s sanctity. She couldn’t. It seemed for all the world like a swath of fabric: enchanted, worn, and unconcerned.

But Walburga’s wand was not pointed at Bellatrix’s name. The instrument challenged a name to the right:

_Andromeda Black._

_Andromeda Black._

_Andromeda Black._

Walburga looked once over her shoulder, to make sure that the Andromeda who stood in the flesh watched. She did.

Walburga squared off. A tongue of flame, briefer and smaller than it might have been, connected with the fabric. Where there once were letters, a singe now stood.

And nothing happened.

Andromeda made an indistinct noise. It was the sound she might have made if someone struck the base of her throat: half-gasped, half-laughed, but it also sounded uncannily like relief.

Walburga hissed, “Now go.” Bellatrix wondered if her aunt also felt a sense of anticlimax. She did not seem to. “If you ever return here, more than your name will be burned. _Go_.”

Unlike Bellatrix, Andromeda had never been one for dramatic exits.

With studious collectedness, without a gloat or a curse, as if she had planned the entire event, Andromeda pivoted.

Bellatrix opened her mouth—then she shut it.

A swish of yellow, a gentle _crack_. It happened quickly. Her sister was gone.

From the tapestry, from the room, from existence.

And the only thought Bellatrix could muster was a question that she couldn’t stomach, a question that she knew she would pull ponderously with her into the grave. She thought: _will I ever see her again?_

Orion, clearly, had other questions on his mind.

“Did you know of this?” he thundered, rearing towards Druella.

Her mother looked like a rather abused children’s doll: tears smearing her cheeks, rouge curdling, disheveled hair, once an elegant updo, beginning to resemble a deflated Yorkshire pudding.

She shook her head. Sobs creased her face.

Across the room, Bellatrix wet her lips.

She had forgotten about her mother. Never had Andromeda been Druella’s favorite—Narcissa wore that mantle—but she had certainly loved her second daughter more than her first. They had seen precious little of each other lately, and Andromeda’s secrecy meant her mother had no preparation for this betrayal.

No, Bellatrix did not envy her mother’s position. Customs meant she had long ago forfeited her Rosier position when she forfeited her name in marriage, and then she had been cracking under the strenuous prolongment of her husband’s illness—a double blow, since it destabilized her claim to her new Black identity in addition to its own obvious grief. Now, she had she lost a daughter. Not only that, Andromeda’s shame further unsettled Druella’s reputation, position within the Black family, and even her rank in the pure-blood community. All this, due to Bellatrix’s reckless insistence to cast Andromeda out as quickly as possible.

A sensation precariously like shame hardened in Bellatrix’s stomach. Soon, she would make her mother risk losing another daughter when she flung herself into the Death Eaters’ dangerous, waiting arms. To this, nothing could be done.

Walburga regarded Druella like she was an insect. “I should hope not.”

“I—didn’t know,” bawled Druella. After months of her stoic, absent silence, the outpouring of unrestrained emotion unsettled Bellatrix. Narcissa, too, seemed perturbed.

“That’s it?”

It took Bellatrix a moment to identify the speaker. She turned and saw Sirius. He hovered against the door frame. “That’s it? She’s gone?”

Orion narrowed his eyes. “We shall never speak of her again.”

“But—I don’t even know what she’s done?” Sirius looked younger than his eleven years, turning from adult to adult with wide eyes that spent the most time on Druella’s wet cheeks. “What’s she done?”

“You heard your cousin,” snapped Walburga. “The traitor did the unspeakable.”

Sirius muttered, “Not unspeakable.”

“What’s that boy?” Walburga shuffled her wand in her fingers. “What did you say?”

“It’s not _unspeakable_ ,” Sirius said loudly. “She got with a Muggle-born, is that it?”

“Vulgarity!” cried Orion.

Druella sank onto the sofa, her sobs increasing in pitch, her head drooping into her hands like a wilted flower.

Spittle rattled from Walburga’s lips with her censure: “Do not say such things.”

Sirius flustered. He looked desperately from face to face, hesitating at the sight of Bellatrix. She was sure he would shout, would say something appalling, would bring down punishment on himself as well. Instead, he flung on his heels and fled the room.

Regulus turned his pointed nose after his brother, then back to the drawing room. As if creeping toward the lion’s den, he trotted to sit beside his wailing aunt. Bellatrix could not tell how much he understood, this youngest prince of the Black family, sniveling and shy by turns. He stared towards the tapestry and its new burn, his eyes as glassy as marbles.

“You did well.” Walburga nodded, and Bellatrix realized her aunt was addressing her.

“I did it for the family,” she answered.

“The family thanks you,” said Orion.

They were like twins, weren’t they, finishing each other’s sentences. They even resembled one another—one tall and one squat, but both graying and wrinkling like over-ripe fruit beginning to rot. She remembered that they were cousins, and her gut wrenched imagining herself wed to Sirius or the infantile Regulus.

Not wanting to look at her uncle and aunt anymore, Bellatrix looked at her hands.

She wondered if she had ever looked so closely at them before, her own hands. A freckle nestled between two knuckles and creases marked the joints of her fingers. Blue veins slithered below the white skin. Her blood curled inside, didn’t it, her pure blood. With her thumb she traced a long, sharpened nail. Sometime back, she had decided to grow them out. She had then liked the way her wand looked perched between them, but she now thought it looked like she was sporting claws.

Bellatrix inhaled. She exhaled. She listened to her mother’s subsiding sobs.

She forced her eyes away from her hands and saw that Narcissa had finally made her way into the room.

Light always managed to find Narcissa, as if it sought her out. It caught in her hair, in her pale gray eyes, in the gap treading above of her collarbones. She stopped in the middle of the floor, facing her aunt and uncle.

“My loyalty will always lie with the family as well,” she said.

These words—the first Narcissa had uttered since supper—surprised Bellatrix. They calmed her.

“I was shocked to learn of the traitor’s actions,” Narcissa continued, “and I am thankful Bellatrix brought it to our attention, so that the traitor could be cast out. And I am thankful for your swift actions and support, which have kept me and my mother and my sister safe from the other one’s evil.”

Gratified, seemingly, Orion and Walburga accepted their niece’s statement.

The calm Bellatrix felt faltered. The gas lamps turned Narcissa’s hair to honey, her skin to cream. She was an expressionless angel. By comparison, Bellatrix felt like something that had clawed its way from some pit. She could never tell what Narcissa was thinking. She had always known when the traitor had been lying—save, perhaps, that final, ruinous instance—but her younger sister was difficult to read.

Hopefully Narcissa’s professed feelings aligned with those she stated. There was no way to know for sure. Though her mood—frightened, grief-stricken—was easily enough to discern in her bloodless lips and nimble, cautious steps, her feelings about the things which prompted this mood would remain a mystery until she said outright. Narcissa was a good actress, to be sure. Much better than Bellatrix, who could only disguise her feelings with supreme difficulty.

Druella hiccuped. Regulus raised a tremulous hand to pat her back. The paternal gesture was inverted and out of place; Bellatrix laughed.

Caught by the noise, Orion looked at her.

“Well,” he said. He regarded the room. “Shall we have dessert and brandy?”

   

* * *

 

After dessert (a sufficiently surreal experience), the evening held one final surprise for Bellatrix. She was climbing the stairs, preparing to retrieve her cloak from the room in which she’d dressed so that they could return to Blackhall Manor, when something burst from a room down the hall.

A bang; a flash; a wrench of pain as the base of her skull hit the floor.

She was flat on her back before her mind comprehended the events that had brought her there.

Feet from her, something panted. Darkness concealed its features, but she had a fair guess.

Sliding up from the ground, Bellatrix said, “No magic until you get your wand, cousin.”

The panting shadow snarled.

She chuckled. “You have always had such a way with words, Sirius.”

Standing again, Bellatrix doubted he had even meant to throw her to the ground; he had always seemed rather frightened when faced with violence, but control was not his strength. Wandless magic was often volatile, and Sirius had not managed to perform intentional magic until the previous year, twice the age she had been.

“Have you just been hiding up here?” she asked him, looking past him towards his room. They had not had a sight of him since he had fled the drawing room.

“Not hiding.”

“What, then? Preparing to throw me to the ground? You can do better, I assure you.”

Sirius worked his lips together, as if deciding what to say.

Finally, shuffling and balling his hands into the pockets of his robes, he blurted, “Why don’t you like me?”

Braced for an insult, Bellatrix was taken aback.

“What?” she asked stupidly.

He said nothing further, just stayed scowling.

“Do you _need_ me to like you?” she asked.

He shook his head vehemently, as if clearing it.

“Andromeda is my friend.” As abruptly as he had changed subjects, his voice had dropped in volume; she had to strain to hear it. “I can’t believe you would…just rat her out. It serves no purpose! Who was she hurting? What good does it even do you?”

“You should be careful,” Bellatrix told him, ignoring his question. All dark eyes and brooding mouth, he peered up at her. “Do not pick a fight with me unless you can handle it, cousin. Because I will give you a fight. I can promise you that.”

On that note, she strode past him to retrieve her cloak.

She was back in Blackhall Manor, stepping out of the fireplace fading from its emerald back to crimson, guiding her unsteady mother, when she remembered the conversation.

 _“Why don’t you like me?”_ he had asked.

_“Why don’t you like me?”_


	17. Warrior

The following day slid in and out of focus, slippery and intangible.

Though she had avoided the traitor for the past week they had been back at Blackhall Manor, Bellatrix had not realized how much substance Andromeda had had, how much space she had occupied.

The house took on an empty life of its own. The familiar rooms were slightly unfamiliar, jagged edges where she expected smoothness. It had felt similarly when her father had first been confined to his chambers.

Bellatrix prowled through the halls like a ghost. Free and bound and feeling as though she might have ceased to exist altogether, she considered breaking something—just to make sure she could still touch, could still affect the world around her.

The small chandelier in the back parlor heeded her _Diffindo._ Glass and iron clattered to the ground. She was not a ghost, at least.

The sound of the chandelier’s shattering echoed off the silent, distant rooms of the house. Druella and Narcissa did not come to investigate. Neither had exited their rooms all day. Bellatrix left the wreckage laying there, like tears against the mahogany floor, wondering how long it would stand—a sloppy, transitory monument to her presence. Maybe it would simply wink out of being like everything else.

As the day wore on, it became clear to Bellatrix that she would go mad if she stayed in the house any longer. More, it became clear that it was no longer her house. The manor had already accepted her absence, shut her out; she was an interloper in the spacious rooms. A cut-out, clumsily inserted.

She would like to think that she spent her hours carefully planning what she would do next, that she had weighed her options and acted with gracious conviction.

This would not be the truth.

She lounged and wandered and had clumsy target practice with the apple-trees that grew in the orchard behind the house. The day was cloudy, strange; her wand marks appeared on the crusted trunks beneath the white sky.

All the while, Rudolphus’s words whirred in her mind: _the Dark Lord will find a way to let you know when he needs your services. I will pass along your names. Nothing more._

_Wait._

Hours came in fits and starts. For lunch, Bellatrix ate cake from her fingers, hunched over a china plate, and drank a slug of firewhisky she found in her father’s study for tea. One of their house-elves, Pokey, watched her forage with wide eyes.

“Could missus use a tart, perhaps?”

She told him she could not and bade him to sit down.

“Do the missuses in their rooms need provisions?” asked Pokey, wringing his wrinkled hands, hovering before the seat she indicated. “I left tea outside of Miss Andromeda’s room, but it has sat there, getting cold! That is most unusual! Is missus Andromeda feeling well?”

“She is ill, I think.” Bellatrix did not know why she said it. Her ears buzzed from the firewhiskey.

She found herself, finally, sitting in her father’s study, watching the sun inch along the paneled wall in its dusky progress towards setting. Dust had settled on the furniture. The room had the stale, cloistered feel of a morgue. She could still remember how this study would gleam with Cygnus’s chuckles. He only wheezed now. She would never hear those chuckles, dry and humoring, ever again.

She was seized with the need to see him. His chamber tended to paralyze her, inexplicably; she had dodged bedside duty whenever possible. But she suddenly needed his presence, compromised as it was.

Clattering up the steps towards his chamber, Bellatrix collided headfirst with her mother, exiting the room.

It was the first time she had seen her mother since they had ushered her to bed, spent and fitful, the night before.

Bellatrix was shocked how normal Druella appeared. She had expected some drastic transformation, some physical impression of permanent damage. Though she was grayer than once, Druella’s hair had returned to its artful pile, her thin cheeks were powered, her eyes hid once more behind a vacant cast, no hint of tears.

“Good morning, Mother,” said Bellatrix.

It was nearly seven in the evening.

Druella turned her head from side to side, as if startled to see her daughter at all. “What are you doing?”

“Paying Father a visit.”                                                        

Druella looked down the hall, staring past Bellatrix. “Your sister will not get to say goodbye to him, you know.”

Bellatrix fiddled with the front of her robes. “I expect Narcissa will make herself available when the time comes.”

“Yes—” Druella began, though Bellatrix knew that her mother had not meant Narcissa.

Druella sighed—a soft, tentative sound, like the breaking of a heart.

“You think you are so clever.” She smiled vaguely at Bellatrix.  “I believe I once thought myself clever, too.”

Bellatrix had always felt stiff around her mother—once, Druella had scolded her almost constantly for lack of comportment. Now, if it had been someone else acting half-mad and distracted, Bellatrix probably would have laughed, but she was incapable of mocking her mother. Nor was she capable of humoring her. She just hesitated by the door, wondering what she could say.

“You are clever, Mother.”

“It is strange,” mused Druella, “hearing you say, “Mother,” you know.”

Bellatrix stared at her. She wondered if her mother had been drinking or if she had truly gone mad, but when they met her own, Druella’s eyes were lucid, clear, bright, and utterly, utterly sane.

“You are a strange, motherless creature, Bellatrix. You always have been. I would not think you were mine had I not given birth to you.” A ghostly smile played around her mouth. “As a baby, you cried endlessly. You would cry as if you were broken, for hours, and I could never stop you. Then, when you were three, you stopped crying. Once, you burned yourself—you grabbed the base of the teakettle, with both your hands, and you didn’t let go even as I watched the burn spreading. You did not cry even then. It was then I knew that we would always be different. Do you remember?”

Bellatrix could not speak.

“Are you going?” asked Druella suddenly.

Bellatrix thought she meant going into her father’s room; her hand retreated from the doorknob to which it had been creeping. She cleared her throat and found the will to say something.

“No,” she said. “No, I am not going. Mother.”

It was only after she had spoken that she realized she had lied.

But Druella was already strolling down the hall, straight and proud as a queen, lifeless as a spirit.

Bellatrix knew, now, that Cygnus’s room would be the last stop. She would not come back.

There was nothing left to do but go in and say goodbye.

Her father’s chamber was oppressive; it was as swollen with pain as he. Bellatrix crept to the chair and sat in the room even so.

She sought his swollen fingers with her own. His skin felt like that of a drowned man, as if his body had clotted itself sucking up water. His flesh could have been bark for how warped by the pox it was. Swallowing her discomfort, she held him tight.

Her throat made a strange sound when she first tried to speak, yet the words were clear in the stilted air when she managed to whisper them.

“Do not worry, Father. I am a warrior.” She gave his hand the faintest squeeze. “I am going to be a warrior. I will make you proud.”

He said nothing. He stayed motionless, but Bellatrix felt the atmosphere in the room change. It tingled, primed with the suggestion of potential energy, as if lightening lingered in the dust and heavy wood furniture.                                

It was good enough for her.

“Goodbye, Father,” she whispered.

When Bellatrix left the room, she was resolute.

Her mother and father she had seen, and she would write Narcissa from wherever she ended up.

Bellatrix did not pack a trunk. She swung a cloak from a peg by the door. Her wand rode in her hand. It was all she would need.

She was out the front door, she was leaving, she was walking onto the lawn in the cooling, floral-scented twilight. Unnaturally cold for June, she thought. As it should be.

She closed her eyes, spun, and could not breathe. The air constricted, collapsed, tightened like a fist…

Bellatrix was free, and her eyes were open.

She stood on the outskirts of an over-grown garden. A peal of drooping flowers bloomed within, some beginning to die as spring gave way summer’s heat.

Bellatrix had never been to Antonin Dolohov’s house before. She saw its pale bones through the branches, a gray smudge on the horizon. Not knowing who would have greeted her had she marched up and rapped on the front doors, she had thought ahead enough to opt for Apparating some distance away.

That was as far as she had thought ahead. Nevertheless, her path was clear. The problem with Rodolphus and Malfoy, really, was that they underestimated her Lord.

Bellatrix did not know how to find him, but she somehow felt certain that he would know of every person who set foot on his self-selected headquarters. If she ventured onto the ground, wanting an audience, he would come to her.

Or, if he did not want to see her, he would send someone else. Or have her killed.

It was a risk she was willing to take.

Bellatrix would have once been intimidated to wait for her destiny. Now, she felt nothing but a knife-point clear sense of purpose.

Dirt and stalks sank beneath her feet as she walked. Bellatrix did not know how much closer she had to get; she trusted she would rather sense when to stop.

Swaths of curving leaves concealed everything else from her vision. Anyone could have been prowling the gardens. It was not the moment for a jejune “hello?” or, “is anyone there?” It was the time for lethal stealth.

As she bent beneath the branches, she felt like a slinking beast, a tumble of intention and menace. She wondered if she herself was being stalked by something even more subtle and dangerous. The notion roused gooseflesh on skin of her neck.

Twilight played tricks. Overhead branches looked black against a sky that was still bright and pale, sinking into purple like a frail, beautiful bruise. Any coalescence of shadow seemed a cloak, but Bellatrix told herself she would sense him.

Her haphazard path widened into a circular clearing of snaking hedge shrubs, tall enough they reached above her head. In the center, a small pond glowed against the advancing night. Bellatrix shivered.

This place was the spot to stay, she decided.

A moment had passed, two, and then more. Her glance drifted to the sky, to the leaves, to the pond—and then she had only a split second of awareness, a sensation of ice and cold and hunger.

She turned. She saw him.

The Dark Lord had entered soundlessly.

He was _absorptive._ His presence drank in the air, the life, the light, and left only sleek darkness.

The gallant stranger from the party was no longer there. Now, it was just Lord Voldemort: the resistance, the Dark wizard, the savior, the divine. He was as cold and unnatural as the June night in which he stood, and all the more enticing because of it.

“Bellatrix Black,” he said. “ _Bella_.”

His voice was as she remembered, the voice of serpents and sensuality.

Bellatrix started forward. She would have to explain. She should apologize for her unannounced visit and beg his pardons.

Before she could crumple to his feet, he said, “I have been expecting you.”

She froze, knee awkwardly crooked. “You have?”

“But of course.”

“You knew I would come to you?” Bellatrix straightened quickly. “You knew that I was planning to declare my loyalty, from the moment at the party—”

“Before.” A smile played around his thin mouth. “Oh, dear, dear Bella, _long_ before. From the first moment I laid eyes on you, in fact.”

Bellatrix did not understand, but her heart clanged like a steeple bell against her ribs.

Seeming to enjoy her anticipation, he gave his explanation in no haste. “You once told me that you knew Legilimency, Bella. What is it?”

“The art of examining thoughts and feelings within a mind,” she replied, never once letting her eyes part from his.

“Quite. You see, I have been looking for new recruits for the Death Eaters, for new life...new pure blood to swell the ranks. I had one of my members bring his son to a meeting, his son and another. Can you guess who?”

Her mind felt vacuous and preoccupied, but she forced herself to think. The answer appeared. With it, Bellatrix began to piece something together.

“Lestrange."

“You _are_ clever,” said the Dark Lord approvingly. “Yes. Into my circle strolled the son of Lestrange and a young Lucius Malfoy. I looked into their minds, as I have looked into yours, seeking thoughts that revealed those that could be assets to me and the cause. And can you guess, Bella, what I saw?”

She _could_ guess. But to speak such a thing herself would render it mortal and mundane; she wanted to hear it from him.

And here, her Lord obliged.

“I saw you, Bella. In both of their minds. Bellatrix Black, coveted by many, feared by all, who is not afraid of pain, who seeks everything with passion...and I knew, I had to make you mine.”

It was almost too ecstatic to comprehend.

A sickish thought emerged—what had her Lord seen of her in Rodolphus’s mind? Bellatrix supposed it didn’t matter. Something in Lord Voldemort’s presence already made her feel stripped and devoid of privacy—he was intimate even as he was apart. It couldn’t matter if he had witnessed her intimacy with someone else.

The Dark Lord’s smile unfurled into a smirk, as if he knew her thoughts all too well. “You know, Bella dear, I think Rodolphus is rather _fond_.”

Bellatrix was unabashed. She could not tell if he mocked Rodolphus or her or the concept of fondness all together.

Night fell swiftly now. The sky above deepened to a velvet puce.

Her Lord’s face shone from the background of dark leaves, which seemed to swallow his black hair and cloak as he looked at her. “Do you really think I encountered you at that party by chance?”

“You went into the hallway for me?”

“Bella,” he said, “I went to the party for you. I arranged for you to be there. I arranged it all. I arranged for you to come to me now.”

“I came alone.” Her heart thrummed. “If you sent instructions, my Lord, I must have missed—”

“ _Instructions,_ ” he sneered. “You came because I know you, Bellatrix Black. I have made you mine.”

She leaned forward. “Why?”

“Because I will remake you.” A glint flashed in his eye—in the dim, the irises looked redder than ever. Hungry. “I have waited for one with the proper qualities, young enough to teach. I will make you stronger, better, darker...you will give your life to the cause. To me. You will be my warrior, Bellatrix.”

No longer troubling that she had never been taught to bow, Bellatrix sunk to her knees. The grass dampened her robes and kissed her shins. “Yes, my Lord.”

She felt his gaze, insistent and sibilant as if it were fingers tracing her body. Her blood flushed beneath her skin. “I am yours. Make me as you would.”

Let the ashes of her old life die. Let herself be resurrected in her Lord’s image. She was ready to incinerate, a dying star trailing in a blaze across the night like an open wound through skin, a vessel for dark and great things.

“I will teach you, Bellatrix,” he said above her.  “The other new recruits...they will learn from others in my service. But you are mine, and you will be my special project. We will have many private lessons together, I think.”

“Yes, my Lord,” she breathed, watching the hem of his robes snake over the grass.

Bellatrix already felt stronger, taller, darker. She felt every inch herself, every inch her name. She itched for her wand, just to give expression to the swelling magic she could feel. She thought she could produce magic like she never had before.

“Then rise,” said the Dark Lord. “I see no reason to wait.”

She scrambled to her feet. “You would train me now?”

He inclined his head with icy precision. “Do not make me regret my selection, Bella. I thought you were clever. Come, grab hold of my arm.”

Bellatrix wondered if she had misunderstood.

“Come, Bella,” he breathed, amusement lacing his features, “do not grow reticent now, or I will have to show you the punishment for disobedience. Grab hold of my arm.”

Bellatrix did. She could feel his tendons through his robes, the flex of sinew and coolness in his forearm.

Above them, the stars had emerged. Somewhere in the sky, the Bellatrix star winked.

They Disapparated. Holding his arm, Bellatrix followed her Lord into the darkness.


End file.
